Los Angeles
A seminal figure in the Mono-ha movement, Nobuo Sekine is particularly associated with its emergence, which was marked by his large-scale earthwork Phase—Mother Earth (1968). For this work, he dug a cylindrical hole in the ground, approximately seven feet wide and nine feet deep; then he placed the excavated earth, made into a cylinder of roughly the same dimensions, next to it. This positive and negative juxtaposition stressed the thingness and relatively unaltered, raw materiality of both the hole and the mound. Like many Mono-ha works, Phase was also about space, its relationship to these “things,” and their combined relationship with the viewer. This show, which featured a decade of Sekine’s work, appeared at first glance to include contributions by a number of different artists…see the entire review in the print version of January/February’s Sculpture magazine.
