Shoji Kato: Ca (Temperatures)
1.5.-30.5.2021
We – Su 13 – 18
and by appointment
Got Calcium?
Except on Earth, the Milky Way galaxy doesn't
contain any milk. But it sure does have a lot of calcium […]
Calcium comes from stars.
From the webpage of Imagine the Universe / NASA
Recently I learned that the otolith, an ear bone, in salmon grows as a tree trunk does. It actually records its outwardly expanding growth log daily. According to natural scientists who read its micro patterns, this biomineralization of calcium carbonate is sensitive to how fishes experience their worlds and other factors, such as the salinity of water, food and the location of their habitat, which has different mineral contents depending on the types of rocks on different riverbeds.
I wondered what the pattern would look like during the so-called anthropause – a period of the coronavirus pandemic when the human impact on wildlife is thought to have ‘paused’.
I didn’t know what an otolith looks like, so I searched for images, then I realised that I actually have some at home. Many years ago, I found them at the bottom of a soup dish made with dried cod, sent from my Korean mother-in-law.
I managed to locate them. Warm white, picking up one piece, it seems to be small, but weighing on my palm.
….............
The exhibition consists of two parts. One is a group of several abstract painting works, made with watercolours, coral and gold, installed in relation to a unique feature of the cellar gallery space.
And the second is a group of images, objects and sculptural elements, assembled into an installation work – Ca (Temperatures) – inspired by the spatiality and the story of the frontal gallery space, which is said to have been a dairy shop, a maitokauppa – well stocked with various milk products that are excellent sources of calcium.
Ca (Temperatures) begins from the front window of the gallery, the glass surface covered with buttermilk as if it were a sign of work in progress, a shoji screen filtering light or the osmotic membrane of an organism, gently protecting the interior from casual glimpses or prejudgements, easily cast from the street, but also allowing the intake of external nutrition for nurturing the works’ psychic landscape, in which those elements of the work may slowly evoke the polyphonic crossings of distanced places, bodies and life cycles.
The title Ca is the chemical symbol of calcium – the 5th most abundant mineral in the Earth's crust as well as in the human body. And its subtitle, Temperatures, suggests the bodies – of every form of life and nonlife, on different scales – in which calcium resides. It also points to the fluctuating states of the bodies and the continuous movements of calcium – the transplantation among and entanglement with those bodies.
Shoji Kato
www.shoji-kato.com
A text compiling the artist’s notes associated with the context and the materials of the work Ca (Temperatures) will be available at the gallery.
The exhibition is supported by The Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike).