Center-Surround

Video Installation | Multiple Venues | 2018 - 2022

Center-Surround at Koki Arts Tokyo

Watch video interview • Read Press Release

〒101-0031 東京都千代田区東神田1-15-2 ローズビル1F
Rose Bldg 1F, 1-15-2 Higashi-Kanda, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 101-0031 Japan

Koki Arts is pleased to present Center-Surround, a video and painting exhibition by Eric LoPresti, from August 15-22, 2022.

LoPresti created Center-Surround to ask a simple question: how can we live under the existential threat of nuclear weapons? Although he travels to Japan representing an American point of view, his art is not intended to confront or insult the Japanese people. Instead, he uses a Japanese art form — the martial art of Aikido — to consider a different point of view on our contemporary global situation.

Press

Grants

Events

Timeline + Exhibitions

2022/08 - Center-Surround at Koki Arts, Tokyo, Read: Press Release.

2019/01 - Exhibited in New Ear Festival at Fridman Gallery NYC

2019/10 - Grant Extension from The Carnegie Corporation of New York to exhibit project internationally

2019/Fall - Artist talks at SIT, Seattle Aikikai and HOK New York

2019/08 - Exhibited at the Stevens Institute of Technology
Center-Surround was exhibited as part of the Reinventing Civil Defense project at the Stevens Institute of Technology. As part of this event, the artist spoke about the concept and creation of this piece. Video: Artist Talk at Stevens

2019/03 - Grant from The Carnegie Corporation of New York
This grant assisted in completion and exhibition of Center-Surround

2018/08 - Exhibited at New Mexico State University
First public viewing, part of an solo exhibition of paintings called Superbloom

2018/09 - Coding, digital production and editing
Several programmers helped me create the data-driven digital animation of Center-Surround, which I then synced to the aikido sound track

2018/06 - Researching the correct number of nuclear tests in history
With no official count of nuclear tests, nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein worked with his students at the Stevens Institute of Technology to research an accurate number: there have been 2427 nuclear weapons in history

2018/05 - Video production begins
Extended aikido shoot at Aikido of Park Slope, an affiliate of New York Aikikai and Hombu Dojo Japan. Thank you to all the volunteers and aikido performers — see credits below!

2017 - Initial concept and sketches
My initial artifacts from creating Center-Surround are now in the collection of the Nevada Museum of Art

About

Center-Surround is a multi-channel video juxtaposing a stream of a multiple-person martial arts practice with an animation of the name and date of every nuclear weapons explosion to date. Looping every two hours, Center-Surround uses the intimacy of hand-to-hand combat to reframe the impersonal violence of weapons of mass destruction.

The first video shows of a group of aikido practitioners continuously sparring and throwing each other onto mats. They are practicing randori, a stylized free-style exercise in which multiple opponents attack in waves. In aikido, a modern martial art that grew out of the post-WWII Japan, the defender avoids brute force and instead respond with movement, creativity and empathy for their opponent. Nonetheless, aikido randori is quite vigorous; as each opponent is thrown onto the mat their body makes the distinctive ‘slap’ sound of a breakfall.

On the opposing wall, a second video shows a succession of colored cards. Each card marks the name and date a nuclear explosion, starting from the 1945 Trinity Tests, Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and each of the 2427 nuclear weapons tests that lead to the present.

The two videos are synchronized such that each card appears precisely at the time of a breakfall in the video. The ‘slap’ sounds propagate through the gallery like a soft thunderclap, while the colored cards infuse the gallery with light. Center-Surround loops every two hours, which is how long it takes the performers to represent each detonation as a breakfall.

Expansive in scope and minimal in style, Center-Surround is an empathy-building meditation on the apocalyptic sublime. The juxtaposed videos physically embody a level of violence which is usually experienced in the abstract: world-shattering apocalypse. Using martial artists to metaphorically re-enact the nuclear arms race within a stylized framework, Center-Surround invites viewers to feel, in a small way, each of these terrifying weapons, not as abstractions or cinematic fictions, but as complex interactions between very real human beings. The artist, Eric LoPresti, is a practitioner of the martial art, aikido, and is of American nationality, however, he hopes that his appreciation of the practice can be seen through the artwork.

Credits

I had an enormous amount of help creating this artwork, and want to thank everyone who made this possible, including:

• Aikido Video Production: Phil Cappello

• Cameras: Tom Piper, Jaime Kahn, Juan Carlos Figuera

• Special thanks to Zach Biesanz, Damon Leary, Lisa Schilling and Robert Schwartz

• Digital Animation: Alex Wellerstein (Nuclear Data, Code), Anna-Brit Schlaepfer (Code), Charlie Pontrelli (Code), Eric Dunlap (Video Sync)

• Creative Consulting: Deborah Fisher

• Aikidoists: Aleksandra Michalska, Deborah Fisher, Derek Wilson, Eddie Leung, Jeffrey Chi, JJ Montes, Juan Carlos Figuera, Keith Miller, Kevin Kanasaka, Kristina Wollschlaeger, Luis Marin Affonso, Neil Applebaum, Robert Madison II, Robert Schwartz, Ruth Peyser, Sam Taitel, Sarah Veysey

• Special thanks to Shihan Hal Lehrman, Head Instructor of Aikido of Park Slope, where the aikido portion of this artwork was filmed, and to Yoshimitsu Yamada Sensei, Head Instructor of New York Aikikai

• Very special thanks to Wood Huntley and Beirne Donaldson for their generous support

• Thank you Malin Gallery NYC, New Mexico State University Art Gallery, Fridman Gallery NYC, and Koki Arts Tokyo