Baku
Bosco Sodi
Aug 24–Sep 11
Bosco Sodi (b. 1970, Mexico City) is an internationally celebrated artist best known for his textured large-scale paintings and his sculptural installations composed of bricks, cubes and spheres formed from the clay near his studio in Oaxaca.
Sodi’s practice has long been influenced by wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic that embraces imperfections and transience, simplicity and austerity, and the effects of forces of nature on natural objects. With a meditative approach to his work, Sodi manipulates his materials with control, inviting spontaneity in how his materials react to natural forces like time, temperature and humidity. In his paintings, this creates surfaces that become fissured and broken, as the thickly impastoed pigments dry. Likewise, his sculptures made from Mexican rock and clay humbly show the cracks and heaves from being fired at high temperatures in the artist’s kiln.
In August, the artist will debut the single-channel video Baku (2012) at Portland Japanese Garden. In the video, Sodi documents the meticulous care of the gardener at the Konchi-In temple in the sacred city of Kyoto, Japan. Every morning the temple gardener erases the gravel garden, cleans it, and remakes it. At once Sisyphean and meditative, the rhythm between the gardener and the garden becomes a hypnotic dance, engaging the viewer in a state of contemplation on the cyclical nature of life. Sodi’s video takes its title from the supernatural beings of the same name, whose role in Japanese mythology is to protect against nightmares. Baku figures are typically placed near temples and shrines to ward off evil spirits. As such, Sodi’s video—the first instance of the Mexican painter and sculptor working with the moving image—offers a meditative spell of protection on the act of the gardener, ceaselessly tending this sacred space.
Guests can experience Baku at Portland Japanese Garden’s Jordan Schnitzer Japanese Arts Learning Center. For over 60 years, Portland Japanese Garden has promoted cultural diversity and peace through nature and art, making it the perfect venue for this Portland-wide arts biennial.
Tickets to the Garden can be purchased at tickets.japanesegarden.org