Jeremy Isao Speier and Junichiro Iwase
At the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre until September 1

When I was on my way, by bus and SkyTrain, to the Nikkei National Museum in Burnaby, I came across a resonant line in the John Banville novel I was reading. It appears toward the end of Ancient Light, as the aging narrator recalls his childhood expectations of the future. “[N]ow the future is arrived,” Banville writes, “…steadily pouring through the pinhole of the present, into the past.” The exhibition I was heading toward, Double Zero, counterposes the mixed-media works of Jeremy Isao Speier and those of Junichiro Iwase. Its subtitle, The Point Between Future Past, hints at the way the present can never be a separate and distinct condition, floating as it is in the circular river of time, of memory and anticipation.

Speier’s series of wall-mounted pieces is titled “Made in Japan”. Composed of new materials, vintage objects, found images, and small, moving parts, they’re what I would describe as assemblages with kinetic elements, but what Speier, in an interview with the Straight at the museum, called “hybrids”. Iwase’s series “Moonwalker” consists of eight freestanding, headless mannequins painted white and covered to various degrees with jagged white pieces of broken eggshell. The title speaks to the realms of computers, physics, and cosmology, while the subtitle alludes to metaphysical conundrums. In the exhibition catalogue, Iwase says, “It is kind of like a chicken and egg question—which came first, the future or the past?”

Speier is an interdisciplinary artist whose works include film, video, photography, kinetic sculpture, and sound. Two of his small photos and a film are also on view here, but the most immediately compelling presence is established by the 16 “Made in Japan” works. Consisting of individual, wood-framed squares, most of these works are divided into quadrangles by vertical bands of paint (red, black, or white) and horizontal bars of natural cedar, with antique postcards or snapshots mounted at the centre, beneath clear squares of Plexiglas, attendant bits of old neon lighting and kinetic elements. Speier described the compositions as referencing Japanese design, such as modular units, shoji screens, and a kind of “Zen” approach to space.

The kinetic components are provided by little rotors removed from old, flip-style clocks and mounted within the frame, usually on the vertical axis. Objects attached to the rotors include a vintage toy airplane, a rusty razor blade, and a twisted bit of cassette tape, turning round and round in mesmerizing fashion. A kind of steam-punk aesthetic operates here: nostalgia is not used as a sentimental ploy, but as a strategy of location in the time-space continuum. It also invokes the way the past imagines the future. The found postcards and snapshots, which date from the 1920s to the 1950s, depict trains, planes, bridges, a couple of black bears in a national-park setting, and people of Asian or European descent. Most of these strangers smile at us from some long-ago moment, not lost but frozen in time.

The title of the series asks us to consider Japan in its predigital heyday of consumer-electronics production. “Japan was a leader in technology,” Speier said, “and now it’s struggling to find its place in the digital age.” In the 1950s and ’60s, before the surge of quality electronics, “made in Japan” connoted cheap, shoddily manufactured goods. No longer. Again, the wide range of images, objects, and references casts us into a continuous renegotiation with time and matter, with the future-past place of the show’s subtitle.

Iwase started working with eggshells as a consequence of his social philanthropy, which includes donating eggs to soup kitchens in the Downtown Eastside. For this exhibition, he has glued a second skin of discarded and cleaned eggshells—a fierce, fragile, scalelike skin that suggests sci-fi aliens or aquatic monsters—onto store mannequins. Eggs are an ancient and enduring symbol of fertility and new life, and they also pose the chicken-or-egg conundrum Iwase mentions in the catalogue. Eggs may be food, too, and in his statement Iwase poetically declares, “Art is food for The Spirits.”

Still, with their connotations of retail display and fashion consumption, the mannequins overwhelm the organic matter attached to them. The eggshells fail to fully transform the banality of the figures to which they are stuck, forever stuck, past, present, and future.