Maria Taniguchi @ Ibid Gallery

Maria Taniguchi tirelessly explores the possibilities of form via a strong investment of both time and labour. Through this she has explored, almost unrestricted, various materials and objects through forms as diverse as pottery and video. For her first solo exhibition at the Gallery, eight large brick paintings appear as walls of an impossible room: on the one hand, they are false surfaces of brick made only of pencil, mars black, and water, outlined in pencil over stretched canvas; on the other, taken in its entirety, a persistent diagram. To those familiar with Taniguchi’s work, here the bricks present themselves again. Just as each individual brick forms part of a painting, so each painting forms part of a larger body. For the artist, the brick paintings combine as one work. Inside the studio they observe time, development, and process. The architecture these walls create therefore carry a different structural concern: the bricks not only build, they measure. Every filled brick behaves like a tally line locked to the next, always counting and recording. The finished paintings are then journal entries inside of which different things have happened. In this way, each completed work, each show, each appearance presents a continuing and recurring event from the mind to the studio outwards; as their numbers grow, they become a conceptual demarcation of practice.