You follow its threads, and it takes you almost everywhere: to the fabric of language and the locus of truth, to the foundation of architecture and the structure of a labyrinth, to the “dark” side of women and metamorphoses into spiders, to Tantra and all possible interpenetrations. So daily, handy, banal and at the same time so mystical. The Weaving.

 Yasuaki Kuroda shows his “Naturally Died Silk Threads”: It is the exhibition of the very transition of something organic and natural into the autonomous and elevated-above-nature, self-defined fabric of the cultural, the symbolic, the linguistic. Threads die to turn into 0 and 1. The natural becomes binary in weaving. The primordial split happens on the loom. But in the same time, it is the practice of

bringing opposites together. It is the practice of The Union. We bite That Apple in weaving (during the day) and at the same time we un-bite it (during the night).  
 Yes, we are bringing another machine into Frantic Gallery. It is the machine that was recording messages long before any writing system ever appeared. Weaving is a craft that presents the structures of the stories in which we inscribe our lives. We can understand how our reality itself is structured by analyzing the patterns that this machine can and cannot create. Our Matrix is woven here, and since it is not without a lack – who knows – maybe we can find the way that a rupture could be made.
Welcome to the grid… let’s see how it works.

Rodion TR
Frantic Gallery Director 

“Naturally Died Silk Threads”
Yasuaki Kuroda Solo Show
Wednesday, November 13 – Sunday, November 17, 2019, 10:00-20:00
Commune 2^nd Midori-so Gallery Space
Tokyo, Minato, Minami-Aoyama 3-13

 Online Catalog

 

Gallery Talk by Yasuaki Kuroda and Rodion TR, Fri., November 15, 17:00 – 19:00
Reception: Fri., November 15, 19:00 – 21:00
Lecture 1: “How can I connect myself to Everything by engaging in weaving?” by Rodion TR on Saturday, November 16, 13:00 – 15:00
Lecture 2: “How Textile weaves “Yasuaki Kuroda”?” by Yasuaki Kuroda, Sunday, November 17, 13:00 – 15:00

 

Facebook Event Page| More about the artists: Yasuaki Kuroda

Yasuaki Kuroda puts the equation “text = to weave” on the frontline of his creation, pointing to the same etymological root of “text” and “textile”. Woven fabric is the cultural domain used for 5 thousands years, and, before writing, used to convey oral messages and manifest social order and the structures of storytelling. In spite of its link with the organic world being so direct, Textile is an outspoken Artifact (along with such handmade objects as pots, for instance).
 

 The shift the fibre makes from Nature to Culture in weaving is revolutionary. The natural thread dies with its transition into the network of warp and weft, it passes away from Nature, to assume a new life in a totally new dimension: It gains new life as a linguistic unit in the realm of an activity that is fundamental for poetry, architecture or the phenomenon of creation itself.

 This is how we present to you “Naturally Died Silk Threads” by Yasuaki Kuroda. The artist uses natural materials to dye the silk threads, but by doing so – they naturally die - he transforms them into the signifiers that will constitute autonomous order of The Symbolic. The woven fabric thus acts as a device that is capable of returning to the artist his own message. It is an inscription – similar to calligraphic writing or the recording etched onto a vinyl record – that acts as a letter the weaver sends to him/herself. Kuroda uses weaving, this counting machine – the prototype of computer – and, with a hand loom in his studio, and thousands of silk threads, he constructs “a world” inside the plane of interwoven silk threads, which is not something that is supposed to convey his fantasies or unconscious particularities, but the evidence of the way he was confronting each particular piece in its creation.

 Kuroda’s weaving shows that singular way in which the artist was connecting himself with the image when he was in the process of making it. This knot between the artist and the work itself is what the work exhibits. The weaving is capable to incorporate the moment and the subject of its creation, and this is what we would like to exhibit this time.

 

 Producing textiles occupied a major part of our ancestors’ lives. Why? Why are many gods in the Greek pantheon associated with weavers? Why does “Tantra” derives from the craft of weaving and denotes “interpenetration”, which is related to the function at the base of the creation of interwoven threads of a fabric. Cloth is the main way to transmit messages before writing, and the origins of text and storytelling can’t be analyzed without scrutinizing the approach to textiles. Weaving is believed to be the foundation of architecture and is related to poetry, marriage and politics. Our perception of the body (tissues) bears a link with fabric and signifies coitus. Textile is the foundation of the structure of the labyrinth. Why? Because, weaving is the primordial operation of uniting the opposites, and textile is the union of the separates that stay separated. Textile is the foundation of Order, it is the ground of the very Symbolic, the network on which signifiers themselves position themselves.
 Nevertheless, it is not ALL. Not all. Weaving is connected with everything due to the function it gives to language itself. But there is an excess, the residue created in this network, and here is where woman, as a major player in this craft, comes in. As in “woman”, there is an element in weaving that is not tied to the Symbolic Order despite it being produced by its own operation; there is a “sticking out part” in this grid, and that might connect us to Everything as an impossible for the Symbolic particle that exists beyond the binary oppositions … of weft and warp.

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