"Jungle Island": Yutaka Sone’s Exploration of the LA Freeway Interchange

By Craig Kirk

Running through July 27th, the Yutaka Sone exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary presents a unique take on a common element of life in Los Angeles: the freeway interchange. Largely considered spaces representing industrial and technological progress, Sone’s show, "Jungle Island," aims to recontextualize these spaces as organic entities.

Featuring Sone’s first major work since arriving to Los Angeles three years ago from Japan, the exhibition features a series of four sculptures. Each one is carved out of four-foot square blocks of white marble and individually recreates a major Los Angeles freeway interchange.

One in a generation of acclaimed Japanese artists, Yutaka Sone’s work reflects his experience with public spaces, having received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Architecture. This sculptural installation is just a sampling of his larger body of work in a much wider range of media.

The installation itself actively engages the viewer. Situated within a manufactured jungle, a mass of trees and foliage, the viewer is forced to venture inside and discover the works on his own. The viewer walks down winding dirt paths, navigating through overhanging branches, to get to each sculpture.

The exhibition appears daunting to the viewer at first, as this huge jungle space contrasts so jarringly with the industrial design of the gallery space at the Geffen. A redesign of an existing factory space by Frank Ghery, large cooling elements and ducts of all sorts hang over the manufactured green space. The curious juxtaposition works well though, as it provides a subtle reminder of the industrial and technical requirements responsible for the manufacturing of these massive behemoths of civil engineering.

To the native Angelino, the presentation of the freeway image in such abstracted manner is quite liberating, as the far removed birds-eye view of the sculpture transforms the experience of the freeway from one of frustration and anxiety into curiosity and beauty.

The looping forms of the interchanges are presented much like a flower in an arboretum. The sculpture pieces themselves become just another set of organic forms lying within the jungle installation. Precise representations of the surrounding roads and buildings complete the image, as these monolithic flowers dominate over the existing cityscapes.

The installation provides a fascinating counterpoint to the fantastic Juan Muñoz exhibition. That exhibition, running concurrently at the Geffen, deliberately manufactures and modifies recognizable spaces. The Sone show, conversely, celebrates existing spacial forms, exploring the relationship of the spaces we build and their seemingly organic construction. Furthermore, as the Muñoz show manipulates the space between people, the Sone show explores the massive public spaces built to maintain the massive flow of people in the Los Angeles autoscape.

"Yutaka Sone: Jungle Island" runs through July 27th at the Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Avenue in Little Tokyo. The museum is open Tuesday–Sunday, 11am–5pm , and Thursday, 11am–8pm.

For more information visit www.moca.org

July 3, 2003