Shinji Turner-Yamamoto + Eric Bourret
Gallery 81435 | July 2020
Gallery 81435 in Telluride, Colorado is excited to present the work of Shinji Turner-Yamamoto and Eric Bourret, an exhibition brought to Telluride by Sapar Contemporary. The artwork explores humanity’s relationship and history with the natural world through sculpture, photography, and time.
Shinji Turner-Yamamoto is a Japanese born U.S.-based artist known for paintings, sculptures, and installations employing elemental materials such as trees, fossils, and minerals, creating profound viewer connections with nature. He works with identifiable imagery to encourage humanity to encounter the essential in nature and time in new and unexpected ways and is committed to using historic and natural elements in his work as meditations on the environment. He studied at Kyoto City University of Arts, and, sponsored by the Italian government, at Accademia di Belle Arti, Bologna, where he lived for eleven years.
Pentimenti is an ongoing sculptural series began in 2010. Turner-Yamamoto works with natural, historic, and archaeological fragments. He collects this debris from abandoned places—plaster and gypsum relief fragments from the deconsecrated 19th century Holy Cross Church, limestone/stromatolite fragments from a defunct Midwest surface mining site, sandstone/coal fragments from a West Virginia mountaintop removal mining site, ceramic pieces from a Moorish archaeological site in Spain, and c.a. 450-million-year-old Ordovician fossils from Midwest roadcuts. Viewed as a kind of sedimentary rock, working with gold and silver leaf, the artist adds new layers onto existing layers of these found objects, emphasizing hidden or forgotten strata. His intention is to evoke the geological time scale, where personal experience transforms into the universal, encouraging viewers to linger in the moment and to experience themselves inside deep time.
Born in 1964 in Paris, Éric Bourret lives and works in the South of France and in the Himalayas. His work as an “artist-walker” participates in the tradition of Land Art and land surveying photography. Since the early 1990s, he has been traveling the world on foot, hiking over all kinds of terrains and at all altitudes, shooting photographs that he refers to as “experiences of walking, experiences of the visible.” His photographs evidence the deep physical and sensory transformations that the act of walking over long distances triggers, as it heightens perception and receptiveness to the surrounding landscape.
During his walks, which last a few days to several months, the artist superimposes different views of the same landscape on a single negative according to a precise conceptual protocol that stipulates the number of shots and the interval between them. These sequences intensify and accelerate the imperceptible movement of geological strata and freeze the ephemeral temporality of human beings. The accident and the unexpected are integral to this concept of random photographic shots. This photographic ephemeris breaks down the structure of the initial image and creates a different sensitive, shifting reality. The image born of this “temporal layering” is vibrant, oscillating, practically animated. More factual series include date, place, duration, distance travelled and thus convey the rhythm and the space of this walking log (carnet de marche). They attest to a subjective experience, as he himself has admitted: “The landscapes that I travel through and that travel through me constitute me. I see the photographic image is a receptacle of forms, energy and meaning”.
This exhibition runs through July 2020 at Gallery 81435, located at 230 S Fir in Telluride, Colorado. Open daily from 12-6pm or by appointment.
SAPAR Contemporary works with international artists who span three generations and five continents. They engage in global conversations and develop vocabularies that resonate as strongly in Baku, Almaty and Istanbul as they do in New York, Berlin, Paris and Mexico City. Their artistic practices vary from meditative traditional ink painting to writing programming code; what connects them are the artists’ capacity for empathy, insight, and imagination, their whimsy and generosity of spirit, as well as the rigor and depth of their studio practice. The gallery program offers a unique lens that is immediate and global, future-oriented and accessible, multi-sensory and immersive. They bring together visual artists and creative minds of other disciplines: scientists, engineers, architects, performers, musicians and perfumers. SAPAR Contemporary also commissions works that are site-specific but infused with sensibilities, materialities and traditions of the artists’ backgrounds.
Join us on Wednesday, July 29 for a virtual closing reception of Shinji Turner-Yamamoto and Eric Bourret's work at Gallery 81435.
We will be live at 4pm MT/ 6pm ET. We invite you to join in virtually for a conversation about the art with Nina Levent, CEO and co-founder of SAPAR Contemporary in New York City.
Submit questions about the artwork to us below, and be sure to come by Gallery 81435 this week for the final days to see the exhibition!
