The Garden of Forking Paths

MIRA GOJAK & TAKEHITO KOGANEZAWA 7 November - 17 February at BUXTON CONTEMPORARY

Curated by Melissa Keys & Shihoko Iida

The Garden of Forking Paths brings together the distinctive practices of Mira Gojak and Takehito Koganezawa, finding points of connection and divergence in the trajectories of these two highly accomplished artists. The project takes its name from the title of modernist Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’ intricate and magical short story from 1941. Part philosophy, part science fiction and part riddle, Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths is a richly multidimensional text that conjures up coexistent but dynamically shifting realms of time and space.

The exhibition similarly traces two very different timeframes, durations and approaches to making. Australian artist Mira Gojak presents new work alongside drawings, sculptures, installations and photographs spanning more than twenty years, while the practice of her Japanese counterpart Takehito Koganezawa is represented by performative video drawings and new improvisational works together with a sampling of earlier works on paper.

To varying degrees both artists lyrically register the fluid instabilities of existence and consciousness – shifting gravities interspersed with moments of weightlessness, the flux and passage of time, and the very elemental processes of growth, entropy and decay.

Tracing the affinities, differences and overlapping and divergent impulses that link and separate Gojak’s and Koganezawa’s work, The Garden of Forking Paths seeks to enter into the evocative, multiple parallel possibilities, realities and territories that they each poetically create.

Takehito Koganezawa was Buxton Contemporary artist-in-residence at the Norma Redpath Studio, supported by CoVA.

Image: Mira Gojak, Prop for Instabilities 2, 2013, The Michael Buxton Collection, The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Michael and Janet Buxton.