Magic Box: Skies of Atlantis
Medium: Magic box (box, mirrors, Sumi ink on mounted rice paper)
Dimensions: 120 × 180 × 23 cm
Skies of Atlantis is a Magic Box. The Magic Boxes are a new art form developed by Drue Kataoka Studios in which, for the first time in the history of painting, the artwork turns its back on the viewer. The painting faces away, inside a mirror-lined box, reachable only through a single circular aperture. Peer in, and you discover that the painting exists for you solely as reflection: scattered across a field of mirror fragments, in pieces, at angles, doubled and interrupted. Shift your body and one passage surfaces while another slips away; what was hidden emerges, what was vivid dissolves. Revelation and concealment arrive in the same gesture. No vantage point, no accumulation of vantage points, will ever yield the whole. The whole takes shape elsewhere — in your memory, glimpse stitched to glimpse. This is how we come to know anything, or anyone — in fragments, across gaps.
The Concept
The Skies of Atlantis, or Underneath the Cement, the Earth Breathes is a Magic Box imagining the skies of the mythical Atlantis, the Land of Plenty, the Earthly Paradise, on the nights immediately preceding its traceless disappearance. The nightly skies are a chaotic stream of energy, ebbing up from the abyss, still unstructured and shapeless, but starting to form and crystallize into clusters of organization that spell the impending doom of the Lost Continent.
The Shadow
Through a mysterious folding of space-time, the peeking viewer can see a dark shadow in the sky traversing the opening to the Magic Box. This dark shadow is a merging of two images — it traces the characteristic diamond shape of Atlantis, as depicted by ancient cartographers. However, within the diamond shape, it follows the contours of a continent yet-to-be discovered by the Western World in Antiquity — a continent that will be the New Atlantis, matching its splendor and possible doom.
