Hiroyuki Hamada Takes Work Outdoors for Parrish Road Show

The Parrish Art Museum’s offsite exhibition series, Parrish Road Show, returns this week for its 12th season of introducing public local spaces of note with site-specific outdoor sculpture — this time featuring an installation by East Hampton artist Hiroyuki Hamada at the South Fork Natural History Museum (SoFo) in Bridgehampton.

Each year, the Parrish and partner venues select artists to create new work to provide unique opportunities for visitors to see and experience art in unexpected places.

“Road Show is site-specific through the artist’s relationship to a venue, creating in response to the surrounding environment, or historical connections,” explains assistant curators and organizers Kaitlin Halloran and Brianna Hernández. “Hamada’s practice instantly resonated with SoFo’s mission through his deep interest in the relationships between nature, humankind, and art. We are so excited to work with Hamada and see his process expand in this new outdoor format!”

On view through October 10, Matter on Ground includes three sculptures by Hamada and it will open with a special artists reception on Saturday, September 9 from 3–5 p.m.

Hamada uses a wide range of unusual materials to create his art, which can often appear as beautiful found objects or archaic treasures dug up from some ancient, or even alien, civilization. He uses enamel, tar, wax, burlap, plastic, wood and resin for these forms which look aged with rich patinas, or simply burnished to give them a sense of importance, history and a weighty presence.

The Parrish Road Show announcement explains that this exhibition is Hamada’s first time creating outdoor work and it continues his exploration of the parallels between nature and art. The artist is diving deeper into this exploration, asking, “How does the work interact with the natural light, with the wind, the rain, the smell of soil and plants, the presence of animals, or under the moonlight?”

Pointing out that he’s worked as an artist for 30 years, Hamada says his efforts making two-dimensional pieces evolved into three-dimensional sculpture, and now outdoor art is the next step in that evolution.

“The materials have shifted from charcoal and paper, paint and panel, plaster, resin and so on and so forth. I’ve worked with venues of varying sizes and shapes with varying missions in different places. But this is my first attempt in making works intended for an exhibition in an open space with the sky as a ceiling and the ground as a floor,” Hamada says in his statement.

“To me, making a work involves intimate observations and intense dialogues with the elements involved. When matter collides with matter, unexpected things happen, and the dialogue becomes a part of the structure. … I attempt to feel what is in front of me as the material for expressing what is not obvious in our daily routines in the social framework,” he continues, adding, “Nature operates according to its own rules and the material tendencies, and realities of a given environment. It does not follow our beliefs, norms, and values in manifesting what it manifests. In that sense, my practice always has been about finding some sort of connection to the process of nature.”

Hamada said the opportunity to show his work outside at the South Fork Natural History Museum is “a relevant one which I approach with seriousness and excitement.”

Organized by Halloran and Hernández under supervision of Corinne Erni, the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator of Art and Education, Matter on Ground is a collaboration with the South Fork Natural History Museum, and it’s made possible by a mix of grants and public funding.

Hamada and Erni are offering a talk about the exhibition at the Parrish Museum in Water Mill (279 Montauk Highway) on Friday, September 29 at 6 p.m.

Hiroyuki Hamada’s Matter on Ground, for the Parrish Art Museum’s Parrish Road Show, is on view at the South Fork Natural History Museum and Nature Center in Bridgehampton (377 Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike). Visit parrishart.org or sofo.org to learn more.