AMABIKI VILLAGE AND SCULPTURE

THE FIFTH AMABIKI VILLAGE AND SCULPTURE / OKAMOTO Atsuo

UNIT 2003 W.B.M

White granite, Black granite, Marble
18×34×200 cm (×3P)

Weeds were growing on the land, and various old utensils were scattered around the barn. The inside of the storehouse had grown into a bamboo grove.
I placed my UNIT in this space, which had lost its owner.

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THE FOURTH AMABIKI VILLAGE AND SCULPTURE / OKAMOTO Atsuo

POSITION (unit, crust)

White granite, Acrylic paint
86×194.5×45.86 cm_1200 kg
86×33×220 cm_900 kg
30×25×350 cm_50 kg

Coloring sculptures and buildings has existed as an occupation since ancient times, but I believe adding arbitrary colors to surfaces as the form, material and texture of sculpture is far from making sculpture sublime by cutting away all that is superfluous.
While I am aware that these works are probably expressions of my own vagueness, in an environment that changes intensely, from winter desolation to the beginning of spring, I could not bear the obvious confrontation of the sculpture alone being an immobile and unchanging presence.
Inside me, everything I thought I had sculpted until now transformed into an extension of canvas from the first touch of the brush.

THE THIRD AMABIKI VILLAGE AND SCULPTURE / OKAMOTO Atsuo

UNIT-9910 A.LB. s1/1 ri

White granite, Unhulled rice
194.5×86×45.866 cm
1000 kg

I named my piece "Unit", meaning the basic form beyond which it cannot be broken down further.
'A.LB' is an important abbreviation for the concept which led to this form. 's1/1' is the scale, meaning that this work is actual size.
'ri' is an abbreviation for the thing that is stored inside, which, on this occasion, is one bale of unhulled rice.
I do not think the space in which the unit is installed is important. Whether it's in a thicket, like this time, or plopped down in the middle of a city crowded with people, or rolling around on a family's dinner table, or standing alongside the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, or buried in grass on the African savannah...
I could call it an object like the monolith envisioned by Stanley Kubrick.
But it's not as overpowering as the monolith.

THE SECOND AMABIKI VILLAGE AND SCULPTURE / OKAMOTO Atsuo

CIVILIZED ZONE

160×160×500 cm
400 kg
Iron, Acrylic board, Television (5set),
TV.camera, Famicom game, Antenna

I feel that there is something in traditional rural scenery that keeps on changing.
It's not in the visible scenery, but rather, the change is going on in the hearts of we who look at it. That phenomenon is clearly visible in children who have not yet developed the ability to defend themselves from it, but the territory of the thoughts and feelings of individual humans is constantly being invaded by a whirl of stimulus, like television images and video games that are manufactured and pumped out by an enormous information industry, under urban civilization and the dominance of economics.
This time, I attempted to express the confrontation between the rural scenery of Amabiki and the TV images that come into our living rooms.
Countless television screens alone are emitting alien light In the dead center of rice fields with darkness pressing in. They stand in the scenery of late fall, as the mountains change color, amid a blizzard which clouds the mountains, forests and houses,.

THE FIRST AMABIKI VILLAGE AND SCULPTURE / OKAMOTO Atsuo

Earth's crust -5

White granite
50×80×65 (h)cm

Earth's crust -7

White granite
160×90×120 (h)cm