Takashi Ishida

Artist/film-maker Takashi Ishida makes abstract, ambiguous works, which blur the boundaries between painting, film, and installation based work. Ishida explores relationships between time, place, sound, and painting. Epic in nature, each work is a physical feat of endurance, the filming process documenting the artist’s movements across each space. Ishida is known to improvise his works, creating them through active experimentation and discerning meaning after. Often large scale, I view Ishida's multi-media work as an exploration of the metaphysical, both for the artist, in his intensive physical experience during the process of creation, and also for the viewer; who is confronted with a document of monumental endeavour. Time spells out the works process, and large scale visuals and sound occupy our senses.

In work to date, my process has been to create visuals which are then passively projected into/onto an environment. Ishida paints directly on/within the environment. This is filmed through stop frame animation with the end film documenting the process of the work. This document is often exhibited in gallery spaces alongside the physical objects/spaces he has transformed. In a way, these are artefacts, by-products of the primary outcome which is the film, the document of process. I am starting to find this in my own work, where my large scale Letheringham Lodge drawings are by-products of a time based process, almost like an empty drinks can, the drawings are containers for the substance which is contained within. The combined digital drawings and animations I create from these large images go on to further explore the process of time.

Ishida's work could be described as crude, not in terms of concept but of execution. These are not refined calligraphic brush-marks but fast broken deliberate stabs and swirls. The stop frame is sometimes disjointed and the edges of sets he may use to site his work within, sit within the borders of the picture plane. The artifice of the work is laid bare. This supposed crudeness emphasises the human, and to my mind makes them all the more accessible and resonant an experience.


Useful links to Ishida's work
http://yokohama.art.museum/eng/exhibition/index/20150328-369.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3GDWwpE_KI&spfreload=10

Below are a selection of stills taken from Ishida's films.