Yasuaki Onishi hangs thousands of copper foil molds in a undulating frame – Huge
In the fluctuations of the Utah Gallery Museum, thousands of flash actors seem to float throughout the space. For his massive installation “Stone on the Boundary”, Japanese artist Yasuaki Onishi suspended 5,000 types of copper foils, which he molded on river rocks in Osaka and Salt Lake City.
It began with the Osaka Artist’s studio, a city where Japanese copper was refined for about two centuries and then installed to the museum, which is less than an hour’s drive from the world’s largest operating open copper mine. Onishi uses elements and mirrored waterways or rippling terrain found in two places, connecting two seemingly unrelated locations through universal materials and industry.
Artists have long been talking about how objects interact with their surroundings, especially the relationship between “positive” and “negative” spaces. This led to in-depth research into the unique uses of materials and materials, which allowed him to explore themes surrounding edges, voids, boundaries and volume. For the installation of Salt Lake City, he considered the relationship between the earth, the landscape and the extraction.
“The copper foil created by Onishi shows absence and existence through molding, indicating that to identify things, we must not only understand the surface, but also to attract imagination richly, even if we have imagination, we cannot see everything.”
For “stones on the border”, thin metal molds produce disc and cup-like shapes that hang along the frame of wires, reflecting the Wasatch and Oquirrh mountains around Salt Lake City. The installation also marks the largest artist to date, covering 12 x 22 x 14 meters.
Find more information on Onishi’s website and on Instagram.
