Bernie’s
2012
Salon 94 Bowery presents Takeshi Murata’s long awaited first show in New York, entitled Synthesizers. This exhibition introduces seven large-scale digital prints, alongside a new video work.
Famous for his pioneering “data mosh” and abstract videos, whose style reverberated on MTV and the net for the past decade, Murata’s new work uses his trademark application of homemade technology. Beyond a tech whiz fan base, Murata engages the art history buff with a constructed world of hyper real interiors and still lives. His images display the technological innovations that invade our 21st century lives: sports drinks, antidepressants, Apple products, brand- name snacks, and exercise equipment. The objects have either been immaculately sculpted through computer programs or purchased as ready-mades from 3D web malls. Without access to a Hollywood animation studio, Murata relies on a shared knowledge from the online community including YouTube tutorials. Using the Open Source model of production, Murata creates digital pictorial spaces hovering between waking life and the dream world, i.e. conceptual photography and surrealism.
The product of Murata’s trademark DIY high tech vocabulary, these contemporary still lives conjure at once Pixar’s Toy Story, Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, and the online 3D game Phosphor Beta 2. By juxtaposing the high-end digital fidelity of Hollywood and video gaming industries with found underground methods, Murata’s “folk” versions appear as the leftovers of everyday life - the crumbs left behind. His process is an amateur’s personal immersion and examination of the “new normal” - a cinematic and brutal HD.
- Salon 94
