2007.05.26
Ashes and Snow - thoughts
Sitting on an artificially created island, Odaiba is as much a
symbol of Japan’s technological achievement as Ginza is the embodiment
of luxury. One of Tokyo’s numerous centers of entertainment, the area
is literally a floating world to which one escapes to for pleasure―just
outside of Tokyo, just beyond reality.
And so it is both ironic and fitting that Gregory Colbert’s
exhibition finds itself erected at the entrance to this oasis of
fantasy. “Ashes and Snow” is an idyll that seeks to evoke a collective
memory of humanity’s marriage to nature rather than its domination of
it. Simultaneously, it creates a bubble that manifests our innocent,
perhaps fickle, desires for an older, simpler, more natural state of
being.
Stepping into Shigeru Ban’s construct for the exhibition, one enters
a sepia-toned temple; a solemn, monumental space in which a wooden
walkway floating on a sea of crushed granite guides you through a
hallway of enormous photographs. Hung between pillars that reach to the
sky, the images depict a symbiotic, poetic relationship between
humanity and nature that is at once foreign and familiar to most
visitors because this is Tokyo and Japan―the epitome of urbanity
removed from nature in a culture that celebrates the essence of
nature’s beauty by artificially extracting it from its natural
environment.
Despite the focus of the exhibition’s publicity on its
documentary-like aspects―these are photographs and videos taken on his
travels through more than forty countries and regions, images
unadulterated by digital technology, images exhibited in a “nomadic
museum”―Colbert’s imagery are far from a documentation of human
interactions with animals. Rather, the images are sculpted and arranged
to suggest through form and tone a vision of cohabitation, an ideal in
which humanity does not dominate the earth, but celebrates it together
with its other residents.
The experience is religious and fantastic. Gazing upon images of an
ideal from the darkness sparks the imagination to dream of adventures
to an exotic, foreign world that is purer and more innocent than our
own―an Eden from which we were banished, a paradise to which we aspire.
In the darkness, we retreat into reverie, imagining ourselves as limber
in the water as our brother whales, imagining ourselves conversing with
the wisdom of elephants, imagining ourselves side by side with the
dignity of the wild cat.
A journey to “Ashes and Snow” is a journey to a world beyond Tokyo―exotic, ideal, natural, foreign and fantastic.
