Explicitly toying with scale, Sawa’s video art is chiefly a poetic mediation of the notions of dislocation and displacement, hinting at the ever-shifting terrain of our existence in the post-modern era. By superimposing miniaturized images on life-size spaces such as a domestic interior or an open book, he blends reality with fiction. His use of black-and-white or monochromatic film is deliberate, intended to help the viewer focus on the imagery and thematic contents. Icons of noisy speed, strength and grand dimensions flying in the boundless open skies, his aircrafts are transformed in proportion and placed in a new context, in an absurd surrealist fantasy spiced with humor.

In the works featured in Observatory Gallery, the artist primarily depicts the interior of his London flat, subsequently surprising us with miniaturized airplanes taking off, flying like insects across rooms and through doorways, and finally landing in intimate corners. Thus, by pairing interior with exterior, noisy aircraft with utter silence, low-tech filmmaking with the precise technology and timing of global travel, he introduces new interrelations between space and time, which embody Joseph Joubert’s assertion: “Space is in time, silence is in space”.

Nirith Nelson
Exhibition Curator

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