Shiro Matsui

Japan

EP04 Dewey's Forest

2009

Mixed media installation, new version for @rt Outsiders 2009

EPO4 Dewey’s Forest, named after the movie Silent Running, is a garden specially designed for weightlessness. An experiment of the garden should be sent to the International Space Station during the Automn 2009, in collaboration with JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency.
In the exhibition space, behind a porthole, unreachable, plants are growing locked in a rotating machine allowing the vegetation to grow in all directions, like in weightlessness. A camera is filming the garden from inside, hence capturing the audience looking at it. At a distance, the image of the garden and the public taken by the camera is projected onto a penetrable fabric sculpture. Reversing the scale, the installation introduces a dialogic relation between the inside and the outside: we cannot be in the garden; astronauts cannot be outside.
For Shiro Matsui, this outer space perspective will give us a chance to research the cross-cultural meaning of gardening, something which is deeply rooted in the relationship between human and nature.

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Biography

1960, born in Nara, Japan. 1986 Kyoto City University of Arts M.A., Department of Sculpture. Lives in Kyoto, has exhibited his works and installations at private galleries, museums, and public spaces all over the world. Working with the idea of the inside and outside of space, his concern and main research is to explore new ways to perceive and experience space.