By Khalida Sarwari
Perspectives have a tendency to shift, and every time they do, we’re compelled to understand things differently.
Using that underlying premise, San Mateo-born contemporary sculptor Chuck Ginnever created “Rashomon,” a sculpture installation that was recently put in place on the newly replanted Great Lawn at Saratoga’s Montalvo Arts Center.
Consisting of 15 identical geometric forms that are each about 3 feet tall and made out of bands of steel, the pieces are grouped in such a way that viewers must move through the installation to get the full picture. The sculpture has 15 different sides and eight balancing points, and the pieces are devoid of right angles and parallel lines.
From one view, the installation appears to be two-dimensional shapes with flattened planes, and from another, it looks like three-dimensional objects in space.
Ginnever, who is known primarily for his large-scale abstract sculpture, has created a piece that is intended to engage audiences with the notions of subjectivity and perception. Visitors are encouraged to move around the installation slowly and deliberately to get the full effect of the art.
The installation is one of the newest being exhibited at Montalvo and is presented as part of the center’s 2013 Arts on the Grounds program.
“The piece is really going to be an exploration for visitors to try and understand what it is–what’s happening there? Is it 15 separate pieces or one singular shape?” said Kelly Sicat, director of the Sally and Don Lucas Artists Residency program at Montalvo. “I think it’s a very nice way to engage our audiences with sculpture.”
Sicat said this is the first time the piece is being exhibited at the center. Prior to coming to Montalvo, the piece was on view at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art.
“I think this was an opportunity to present an object of sculpture on our grounds, emphasizing our focus on developing our sculpture program,” she said. “This was an opportunity for us to work with ICA as a partner and display a work of sculpture that was more of a formal sort of style.”
“Rashomon” ties in also to Montalvo’s programmatic theme for 2013-2014 of wellness and well being, said Sicat.
The center will hold a celebration event sometime in August, when it will screen the 1950 Akira Kurosawa film that the installation was based on and promote a dialogue about Ginnever’s artwork.
The film, which depicts a violent crime through the widely differing accounts of four witnesses whose testimonies are mutually contradictory and motivated by factors such as ego, is intended to be an exploration of multiple realities and demonstrates the inherent unreliability of subjective experience.
The Rashomon exhibition will run through Sept. 15 on the Great Lawn of the Montalvo Arts Center, 15400 Montalvo Road in Saratoga. The grounds of the center are open for free to the public daily.
