From October 16, 2024 to Novemver 17, 2024
Venue: The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum
Address:
9-01 33rd Road (at Vernon Boulevard)
Long Island City, New York 11106
718.204.7088
Contact: info@noguchi.org
» Official Information
How do the smallest of spaces allow us to comprehend the vastness of the universe? How can a sense of the infinite be found in the finite? Is it possible to fold the cosmos? These questions have long animated the work of Japanese designer and interior architect Miwako Kurashima. Her roving and mutable installation * folding cosmos, presented at The Noguchi Museum from October 16–November 17, 2024, gives form to this interplay between the intimate and infinite, offering a quiet space for gathering and contemplation.
Kurashima took inspiration for this project from the story of the “One-Mat Room,” a small study space created by the nineteenth century Japanese explorer Takeshirō Matsuura (1818–1888). Constructed from wood collected by far-flung friends at important sites throughout Japan, the room became a kind of map of Matsuura’s social network and locations that held meaning for the explorer and those he knew—a collapse of accumulated knowledge and experience into a single charged space.
* folding cosmos is Kurashima’s contemporary interpretation of Matsuura’s One-Mat Room. Visitors are invited to gather on the modular seating arrangement, which was inspired in part by the seating components of Isamu Noguchi’s design for the UNESCO Garden (1956–58) in Paris. Kurashima has also drawn a connection between this space and the “folding universes” of Noguchi’s collapsible Akari light sculptures, which have been a lifelong source of inspiration for her. Although the One-Mat Room was not used for tea ceremonies, through each iteration of her * folding cosmos project, Kurashima assumes a role similar to the traditional tea master or host. She approaches each setting as a sort of expanded tokonoma, the alcove of the tearoom where the host displays and arranges objects especially selected for guests’ aesthetic appreciation. Noguchi’s Akari have remained the one constant. Here Kurashima includes a selection of Noguchi’s sculptures alongside pieces by contemporary Japanese artists Aï Kitahara, Kineta Kunimatsu, and Ayumi Tanaka that each uniquely engage with the concept of a folding or collapsed universe. In these works, nature, light, and time seem to expand and contract, each implying an endless continuum.
