The Quiet Quiet of Arturo Kameya’s Paintings at Alone Time Gallery
For his contribution to Prospect.6, Arturo Kameya created a haunted space at Alone Time Gallery. His installation Whatever comes first occupies three dimly-lit rooms staged to feel like an abandoned space. The floors are covered with a thick layer of coarse sand that makes a crunching sound underfoot, illogically amplifying the quiet of the space and encouraging visitors to proceed with careful steps. The sand is more metaphorical than illustrative; most abandoned spaces don’t fill with sand. But sand holds implications of geological time. This exhibition asks viewers to consider the things that hold human time and human stories: rooms, objects, and above all, paintings.
In the first room, textured paint and drip marks on the dark walls make the space feel dank, a greenish light might suggest the presence of the supernatural. Painted wooden cut-out figures sit in broken chairs like ghosts or memories frozen in mid gesture. The second room is darker, its contents—a large painting, a helmet resting on a red footstool—are harder to engage with because of the mechanical spectacle a few feet away. Bathed in red light, there is a gyrating glass and metal shelf on which a Virgin Mary night light glows and changes color (Midnight Radio). At first, this found object, animated as if by a poltergeist, seems like the main event of the show.
However, on the walls of each semi-dark room there are paintings that hardly ask to be seen. There are fewer footprints in front of the paintings, suggesting only a fraction of viewers spent time looking at them. Within the installation’s narrative, we might assume these paintings belonged to those who inhabited the space. But the paintings, especially the seven small paintings in the front room, are not set dressing to the installation. They are not still lifes of fruit, portraits, or pastoral landscapes typical of home decor; they are vignettes depicting deeply human interactions with objects that furnish a life. These paintings are artworks in their own right, reticent and mysterious, the real deal.
Paintings reveal themselves more slowly than other types of artworks. What they lack in spectacle or immersive appeal, they can make up for in their ability to draw a viewer into their world within four edges. A painting is layered, typically the result of hundreds—if not thousands—of gestures and decisions situated within the entire history of the medium. As I discovered the paintings in the gallery, it felt as if the artist had buried the lede. Whatever comes first is, in fact, a painting show.
All seven paintings in the front room are vertical format, acrylic and clay powder on wood. The surface is dry and matter-of-fact like the subject matter, deadpan moments of everyday life. One painting (part of a triptych titled Plasticity) provides a frame within the frame, a doorway through which we see the corner of an outdoor space. This familiar pictorial device, a window within the “window” of a painting, transports the viewer through the layers of expanded space. The viewer, who has already entered the concocted space of the installation, looks at a story within a story. In the picture, in a sunlit corner there is a bucket hanging, presumably filled by a green hose. Water showers from the bucket on three plants below—a homemade irrigation device. This elaborate set-up provokes the question, is this worth doing? The question expands to include the installation itself, to artworks in general.
Another painting (Pyramid II) shows a figure dressed in a bottle-shaped costume with the words Coca-Cola in script. It may be a paper costume or cut and painted signboard, echoing the cut-out figures in the show. We don’t know if this figure is dressed for amusement or work, like promoting products to passing drivers for low wages. Looking closer, the costume wearer’s eyes, seen through a hole in the costume, are crossed and his hand is seized in a strange position at his side, moving and human details so subtle they could be missed.
When I returned to the gallery to see Whatever comes first a second time, my experience of entering the transformed space was stripped of my initial disorientation. Some installations can be impactful once like an M. Night Shyamalan movie; knowing the twist ending, a second viewing is mere confirmation. Other immersive installations, like Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, can be experienced again and again. Whatever comes first falls somewhere in between. Or it would, were it not for the paintings. For these, I will come back a third and fourth time.
As I moved from one small painting to the next, the rest of the installation fell away. I lost time. The quiet got quieter and I was no longer thinking about art or anything else. I was listening—visually, neutral, receptive. Wondering if Kameya’s paintings would hold up in full light, I asked the attendant to turn the lights on. The paintings were just as good, better even, because I could see them in more detail, silent and stirring. Weeks later they are still haunting me.
Whatever comes first will be at Alone Time Gallery through February 2. For more info, check out prospect6.org/venues/alone-time-gallery and @arturo_kameya on Instagram.
Top photo by Emily Farranto; bottom photo by Dan Fox
