Exhibition Review: CMTK | Double Trouble
CMTK (Chihiro Mori x Teppei Kaneuji)
Star & Dust (Atami/Many Colors), 2022
Lenticular film on acrylic panel
32 x 32 inches
Written by Luxi He
Copy Edited by Robyn Hager
Photo Edited by Alanna Reid
CMTK: Double Trouble will be on view in Jane Lombard Gallery at New York till 15 February. CMTK, a name coming from the abbreviation of Chihiro Mori and Teppei Kaneuji, is a group of two Kyoto-based artists who use photography, collage and printing technique to explore the sensual landscape of modern life, and to contemplate on layered iconology. The exhibition will present multiple large-scale collage works made from lenticular printing on acrylic panels, and the culminative result is a hallucinatory, overwhelming collection that speaks as the alternative image archive of a particular age.
CMTK (Chihiro Mori x Teppei Kaneuji)
Star & Dust (New York/Non-Alcoholic), 2022
Lenticular film on acrylic panel
20 x 20 inches
The major series in the exhibition is a collection of collages called Star & Dust. In this series, photos taken by Kaneuji of mundane life are layered with images symbolic of the middle to late twentieth century. Iconic faces such like Michael Jackson and The Beatles, old-fashioned cars from the golden age of industrial manufacturing and road trip. Printed on the acrylic panels, the material lends every image its semi-transparent, neon color, and Chihiro Mori’s use of lenticular printing further gives the collage works a slim, perpendicular texture and a visual depth that feels futuristic and cyber-punk. Viewers will be able to take in all the images within one look. It feels, as if we are looking into a tunnel of photographs.
Teppei Kaneuji
Sea and Pus (Photograph of Cat) #8 , 2022
UV inkjet print (StareReap 2.5 print) on acrylic board, polycarbonate
10 x 12 inches
Edition 3/7 + 2 AP
Chihiro Mori
Midnight Green (DEAIGASHIRA), 2017
Digital animation
10 sec
Edition 10/10
Many artists have the ambition of creating an imagery archive for a particular age, but few have been as creative and as skillful as CMTK, whose work is worth seeing for their preciously democratic attitude when it comes to choose the images representing an age. Images of mundane life—the daily food, subway sign, a red balloon floating on the river—the fragmentary moments we saved in our cameras, phones—have been given an equal attention as the iconic superstars and advertisement. The intention behind this choice is CMTK’s desire to show a particular age faithfully, in its “connections, or lack thereof, between the lived experience and the observed.”
In its simplest sense, collage means putting unrelated images together in a way that deconstructs rule. What remains rarely discussed, however, is collage’s potential of reconstructing a visual scene that shows the innate liveliness and interactive fertility of images, and this, luckily, has been picked up by CMTK.
CMTK (Chihiro Mori x Teppei Kaneuji)
Star & Dust (New York/Cars), 2022
Lenticular film on acrylic panel
32 x 32 inches
The two artists have once stated that “visitors will be able to experience the views and perspectives that emerge and become visible from the overlapping of things of different origins” As viewers walk around their work, images on the lower layers will shine through the upper ones, while the top images will have their colors and shape modified by the image cluster underneath. The collages have formed an autonomous space within which new images are constantly being generated by the on-going interaction between images. In this sense, CMTK’s collages are also what W. J .T. Mitchell has named metapictures: “a kind of vortex, or ‘black hole’ that can ‘suck in’ the consciousness of a beholder, and at the same time (and for the same reason) ‘spew out’ an infinite series of reflections.”
CMTK (Chihiro Mori x Teppei Kaneuji)
Star & Dust (New York/Coffee), 2022
Lenticular film on acrylic panel
20 x 20 inches
