Tomoko Amaki Abe's recent work, at A.I.R. Gallery near downtown Brooklyn, often made of such materials as concrete wood, and glass, invokes the passage of time and its effect on both natural materials and the melancholic presence of decaying urban sites. In this new body of work, quite a leap ahead when compared to earlier efforts, Abe creates works determined by images usually encased in glass.  The main installation is three separate works lined in a row on pedestals, the transparent face of each stanchion features black and white silk-screened images.

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At first glance, there is very little that ties the work to Abe’s Japanese background. Because the artist was trained in Scotland and has been living in New York City’s environs, perhaps it is natural that the artist would inevitably make art evidencing contemporary Western art practice. Her rows of glass plates, following each other (often in groups of three) on waist-high white supports, emphasize their formal display. More often than we would think, advanced sculpture today derives strength from architecture–its double function as art and shelter, its closeness to sculpture–but on a larger scale.

The images contained by the glass are often dark in tone and are often disorganized photos that are hard to describe or even understand. But they belong to an esthetic in which the ruin, and its implications, take over the meaning of the work. This means that the images' chaotic appearance affects the presentation of nature and its decay over time, as well as indicating the wild distress of overused or abandoned urban spaces. Also, not only do Abe’s works describe time, but they embody it in their facture and imagery. It is remarkable to see time made visible, as happens in the artist’s efforts.

Abe is an artist working in a strongly post-modern milieu, present nearly everywhere today. But she is more than that–she is strongly involved in her facture and her ideas, which come from long experimentation. As time passes, the modernist tradition may become moribund, but this hasn’t happened yet. 

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In the meantime, Abe relies on the fragment, the mixing of art genres, and the visionary eclecticism that still distinguishes art made now. Questions of Asian influence simply do not come up. So the themes of Abe’s two shows have mostly to do with how the image, encased in a frame, can be used to reify time. The capture of time is impossible, but Abe does a very good job of slowing it down for study, as evidenced in the works we can discuss now.

Abe’s work brings up questions about how her approach might be used in the future. Our past is fast approaching oblivion resulting from computer use, which recalls facts without remembering the emotions that accompanied them. Abe’s work, whose intense emotional life is almost always indirect, presages a time when the facts will be lost to time’s passage. And this is the basis of her current work: the capture of time, which can only be rudimentary at best.

We move into more and more narrow pathways of recall, which results in increasingly narrow pathways of emotion, thought, and even behavior. Abe’s art is elegiac in the sense that most art stems from memory. A sense of loss occurs even when the memory is created imaginatively. Today we need a visionary realism more than ever before, and Abe, being gifted, as she is, turns the past into something tangible. The tangibility is real, despite coming from the mind.

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This being hard to do, Abe achieves her aim. In Black to White (2023), an environment occupying a corner of the gallery’s front space, thin bent limbs, made of wood and cast glass, hang over the ceiling and come close to a white oval surrounded by thin stick-like pieces of dark brown textile. It is very poetic in its tacit suggestiveness. The aura of the work is derived from a sensitive reading of nature – and Abe’s ability to find cultural value in nature.  The exterior world thus becomes subject to the imagination. Likely the two worlds influence each other.  Caught in the tangle of Abe’s imagination, and the intricacies of her environment – we remember that Abe lives close to the Long Island Sound – Black to White functions as a vehicle for nature within the confines of cultural expression. 

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In the wall work entitled Lava Blue (2022), a slate blue, circular porcelain slab is attached to the wall and extended three inches from the wall’s surface. In truth, the work is more truly a slab: there is a jagged cut into the porcelain on the upper left, and the body of the relief consists of a rough exterior with holes extending back into the wall. The parts and pieces of the work push against each other in near aggression. The piece is deep enough to throw shadows on the wall behind it. Lava Blue works as an abstraction that could be read as an image taken from nature. It is not so far from a visionary evocation of earth.