BE THEREMeiro Koizumi 2008Presented by Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery January 17, 2008- February 16, 2008Reception: January 17, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pmMeiro Koizumi
Characterized by child-like role playing, physical discomfort, and absurd scenarios, Koizumi’s videos treat the medium with brutal disregard. Inner struggles both sensual and sinister are brought to the surface in a dark, claustrophobic universe. Rough production values and a grandiose mash of comedy and physical theater, often centered upon the male body, disturb Koizumi’s submissive viewer. Together with the artist’s collage works on found magazine pages, they pit perception against illusion, morality against aesthetics. Human Opera XXX is part of Koizumi’s XXX:TRILOGY, a series of films in which actors are asked to perform uncomfortable roles in crude sets that suggest a spacecraft. In the winter 2006, Koizumi put out a call for a man who would talk about his tragedy in front of video camera for money. Among several people who replied the call, Koizumi was especially interested in a man who had a strange scar on his forehead. Without knowing what his story was, Koizumi invited the man to tell his tragedy in the studio set. In Art of Awakening, an earlier video, Koizumi lures guests into an imaginary world where corporeality and intangibility arm-wrestle until a work of disturbed fantasy emerges. Through tight control of the camera and comic timing, the artist generates excitement and frustrates the viewer, turning bizarre repetetive actions into uneasy demonstrations of the artist’s imagination. With cold dispassion, the artist reveals slippage between the world of images and fallible humanity. Two recent collage series which resurrect images found in news media are shown alongside the video works. Through a reverse process of provocative fiction, the images are manipulated into fantastical illusions that deconstruct the concept of popular and news media, revealing their underlying structure. In the collages, as in Koizumi’s video, subjects become puppets not only for the artist, but for our own questions of pleasure, perversion, and humiliation. Meiro Koizumi received his BA in 2002 from Chelsea College of Art and Design, and was the 2001 recipient of the Beck’s Futures Award for Film and Video, student category. He has completed residencies at Arcus Project, Ibaraki, Japan (2003) and Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (2005-6). His recent solo exhibitions include Dicksmith Gallery, London; Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; and Mary Mary, Glasgow. In 2008 there will be a retrospective of his work to date at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle. Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery first presented his work as part of Idiot Joy Showland at IFC, New York (2007). This is his first US exhibition. Reviews of Meiro Koizumi 2008
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