目[mé]

Art collective 目[mé], founded in Tokyo in 2013, is known for their mind-boggling and whimsically philosophical installations that lead the audience in a careful and considered way to see the world from a perspective that unsettles assumptions, expectations, and pre-conceptions. Ever-interested in finding different approaches to how we normally make sense of the world, the artists create works that seem ordinary on the surface but hide paradoxes or deeper existential questions that can only be recognized through mindful observation of the world around us. 目[mé] believes that the world consists of the realm of the unknown, which cannot be perceived, and the realm of the known, which we can perceive or, more accurately, that we think we can perceive. The collective aims to lead the audience to explore the space between these two realms—and it is this territory that requires them to see the world in alternative ways.

Whether working on a monumental or intimate scale, the group’s practice always brings a moment of catalysis. In 2020, for the Arts Towada 10th Anniversary Exhibition in northern Japan, 目[mé]contributed an installation titled space, literally inserting a rectangular white-cube space into a second floor of a building, cutting through the building from the façade to the rear, with each end sealed by a clear glass pane, revealing freshly painted white walls and the ceiling inside. True to the function of a gallery space, another work by 目[mé], Acrylic gas T-1 #18 (2019), was on display inside. From street level, it looked like a gallery of a new contemporary art museum had been photoshopped into an otherwise uneventful everyday scene.

In contrast to the monumental scale of space, 目[mé]'s HT22 installation presents a series of works titled matter, posing questions of space, time, and matter from a microcosmic perspective. These works are literally stones, meticulously created by 目[mé] using real sand grains that have been compressed in a process that is, in itself, a compressed version of the geological process. A set of two large stones and another set of two small stones are placed in the Honolulu Museum of Art space. These stones trigger our curiosity: they are ordinary and negligible, except for the fact—if one notices—that the pair in each set are faithfully identical. When a single stone is created, grainy patterns and blemishes occur by chance; however, in order to make its exact replica every marking on the stone must be treated with a newly acquired meaning. As 目[mé] explains, the stones are therefore transposed from a ‘coincidental position’ to an ‘inevitable position’ in the spatial coordinate axes. In the group’s production of identical multiples, we are encouraged to carefully see the often-neglected existence of stones and to search the line between artifice and nature, perhaps also coming upon the question of what intention makes matter’s existence inevitable—a cosmic happening or control.