Taro Shinoda arrived jet-lagged at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It was 2007; the Japanese artist, who had the run of the museum after hours as an artist-in-residence, wandered out into the courtyard under the night sky and glanced up at the moon. It triggered a memory: Shinoda had come to the United States as a small boy with his father for a visit. Missing his mother, he gazed at the moon, knowing she would see the same pale orb. He entrusted the moon to carry messages home to her.
Moon over Boston, Tokyo, and Istanbul
“Taro Shinoda: Lunar Reflections,’’ a lusciously contemplative installation now up at the Gardner, takes off from that childhood reverie. It’s a phantasm of a piece, tantalizingly beautiful and absorbingly slow-paced. For all its spell-casting, it has its roots in concrete, even basic ideas, techniques, and traditions.
When he was in residence at the Gardner, Shinoda built a rudimentary telescope out of lenses and corrugated cardboard, and he outfitted it with a video camera. He traveled to the outskirts of Boston - to Orient Heights, to Castle Island, to the Blue Hills - and from these vantage points videotaped the moon’s passage as well as images of the city. Since then, he has shot similar footage from places in or near Tokyo, Istanbul, and Limerick, Ireland.
Images from those videos, in black and white, fill one end of the museum’s small contemporary gallery. Giant projections of the moon edge across the large screen, alternating with flickering cityscapes shot from a distance.
Shinoda has covered the darkened gallery with glossy silver paper, a nod to Ginkaku-ji, the Zen Temple of the Silver Pavilion in Kyoto, which has a moon-viewing platform. The shogun who built the temple intended to cover the pavilion with silver leaf, but never got around to it.
Down the center of the gallery, Shinoda has placed his own low seating platform scattered with pillows, an element of Japanese design known as an engawa. In Japan, the engawa divides the domestic space of the house from the enchanted space of the garden; viewers are encouraged to sit at the cusp of that enchantment and meditate upon it. The platform here, curiously, runs perpendicular to the video projection (although viewers sit on pillows in loose rows, facing it), tossing to the winds the strict division between mundane and fantastic.
The final element, sound, is an audio feed from the museum’s courtyard, where it all began. Water makes a slow drip, and there’s the bustle and murmur of the museum visitors there.
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