Conceived as two room-sized installations shown in two spaces—a whole in two parts— visitors are encouraged, via instructions, to visit both spaces in order to experience and fully understand THE RIVERBED. Both galleries will have a pile of large river stones that Ono has selected and gathered. She will inscribe the words like remember, dream, and wish on the stones, which have been honed and shaped by water over time. Visitors may pick up a stone and hold it in their lap, concentrating on the word and letting go of their anger or fear, transforming the stone into an emotional object to be placed upon the pile of stones in the center of the room. Additional instructions on paper will encourage you to “draw a lineto take you the farthest place on our planet.”
There is no doubt Ono is an important artist. Grapefruit encoded itself in so many artists alongside the acid trips with it to appear at inopportune times in the future, haunting forever this one psychedelic time. It's steroidic aporia. Ono's scores place language through a series of permutations stretching meaning into duress - the "imaginative" - and the resultant structural loss like watching the collapse in happen in slo-mo silence, in a helpless state of emptiness where things had once stood attaining a tone of the oddly reverant and churchlike, "zen," and moralizing and a one of art's most spectacle like tropes.
See too: Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen at Corvi-Mora
