More than 300 people are expected to help dismantle Return to the Sea: Saltworks by Motoi Yamamoto in the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston School of the Arts. At 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, July 7, the end of gallery hours and the official end of the exhibition, the public is invited to gather a small amount of the salt. Then, as a group the community will return the salt to the sea at the Aquarium Wharf on Concord Street. The Halsey will have containers available for transporting the salt and the public is invited to bring their own bags, jars or bottles. Watch a video.
The official Spoleto Festival USA visual arts selection, this exhibition was a site-specific installation created entirely out of salt by the artist during his two-week residency at the Halsey Institute. Return to the Sea: Saltworks by Motoi Yamamoto will travel nationally after its inaugural presentation at the Halsey Institute, including stops in Charlotte, N.C., Los Angeles, and Monterey, Calif. Watch a timelapse video of the installation.
Curated by Mark Sloan, director and senior curator of the Halsey Institute, the exhibition also featured a series of recent drawings, photography, sketchbooks, a video about the artist, and a 170-page color catalog documenting twelve years of the artist’s saltworks around the world. The catalog includes essays by Sloan and Mark Kurlansky, author of the New York Times best seller, Salt: A World History. The video, produced by Sloan and Emmy award-winning videographer John Reynolds, includes interviews with Yamamoto at his studio in Kanazawa, Japan, insight into his creative process, still images and time-lapse videos of many of his previous installations, and an overview of the fascinating history of salt in Japanese culture.
This project has received support from the Asian Cultural Council, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, Japan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Motoi Yamamoto is an internationally renowned artist who calls his native Japan home. He was born in Onomichi, Hiroshima in 1966 and received his BA from Kanazawa College of Art in 1995. He has exhibited his award-winning creations around the globe in such cities as Athens, Cologne, Jerusalem, Mexico City, Seoul, Tokyo, and Toulouse. He was awarded the Philip Morris Art Award in 2002 as well as the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2003. Although he participated in a group exhibition that same year at New York’s P.S. 1, his work has yet to be widely seen in the United States.
Yamamoto is known for working with salt, often in the form of temporary, intricate, large-scale installations. Salt, a traditional symbol for purification and mourning in Japanese culture is used in funeral rituals and by sumo wrestlers before matches. Yamamoto forged a connection to the element while mourning the death of his sister, at the age of twenty-four, from brain cancer and began to create art out of salt in an effort to preserve his memories of her. Yamamoto views his installations as exercises that are at once futile, yet necessary to his healing. An important aspect of the installation is the dismantling of his work at the end of the show and delivering the salt back to water, usually in collaboration with the public; hence, the title Return to the Sea.
Motoi Yamamoto has had very little exposure in the United States with the exception of his participation in the Halsey Institute’s group exhibition Force of Nature in 2006 and a group show at P.S. 1 in New York City in 2003. For Return to the Sea, Yamamoto will travel to each venue on the exhibition tour to create a site-specific salt installation in tandem with the drawings, photography, sketchbooks, video, and catalogue. The Halsey Institute’s goal is to introduce the work of this artist to a much broader audience, create a lasting document in the expansive catalogue, and provide an indelible vision of the artist’s unique process through the video.
The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art is a non-collecting contemporary art museum located on the campus of the College of Charleston, on the corner of Calhoun and St. Philip Streets. HICA offers a comprehensive contemporary arts program that is committed to providing a direct experience with art works in various media, in an environment that fosters creativity, innovation, and learning. The Halsey Institute serves as an extension of the undergraduate curricula at the College of Charleston and as a cultural resource for the region by producing exhibitions, lectures and panel discussions, film series, publications, and a comprehensive website. In addition, the Halsey Institute seeks to foster meaningful partnerships with local organizations in order to further the reach of contemporary art within the Charleston community. Admission into the galleries and to most programs is free with the public encouraged to attend.
