An unpainted area stands out from a muddy field of color. The image is plain, and the title reads [Void]. The empty white bit is in the shape of a mountain peak--and that's all it is.

At Twinspace, Toshihiko Takeda has 'quite' work on display. Some are up on the wall, another is on a table, and one makes use of a pedestal. The individual pieces mostly represent scenes or replications of sites from personal travels outside Japan, and as the title of one hints, Takeda made it to Iceland--in fact most of the work has a deep snow element about it.

There is an all too vague look, altogether, empty of any real time or place, and the execution often looks, well, just good enough to get the job done.
Each piece speaks reservedly, as mentioned, so there is really not a lot to see. Slowly, though, you do start something pulling together.

It is unavoidable sometimes; that you need some background information, even if the things that you are looking at are sufficient in their communication without extra help. In this case, the extra is helpful.

It came as somewhat of a surprise to find out from a review in Japanese, that Takeda says he puts as much effort as he can to draw from memory the detail of each place, while, as I was later to understand, this detail is not always visual, or apparent.

With [horizon 2003] a small table with a plaster slab, said to be a topographic view seen from an airplane of some place--and maybe it's Iceland, though could even be a desert, who knows--has fine gray lines drawn on the surface. Takeda says the lines are drawn as he saw and remembers them. The plaster surface has slow undulations, again to mimic the plane view of the landscape he remembers. It's an odd thought; someone trying to transcribe an image of a landscape that probably covers hundreds of square miles from don't-know-how-man-miles-up, with the only retrieval system in operation a simple and often feeble human memory, and then talk about detail. It's ODD. But it's attractively an odd thought.
[The title 'Horizon' is also strange, and wonder if it refers to the edges of the plaster, where past them you cannot see?]

It comes as no surprise to learn Takeda is interested in what happens when experience and memory intersect--and what is on view at Switchpoint has much to do with this.
On each side of memory is a direct experience, and when thinking in a linear fashion it's easy to come to a conclusion that the more memory you carry the weaker the actual direct experience becomes, with all that stuff clogging up something even if you don't know what!

Sides, too, can easily be understood as top side and bottom side, with memory/experience and experience stacking vertically, quite possibly, unevenly, depending on the weight and size of each. As there is not a lot of gravity going on in the human memory storage system, there really is no need to be too careful about how neatly these things stack. Each has it's own glue. In a way, experience and memory are always intersecting, when you cut through the stack vertically. On the top of the stack the surface is always memory and, at once, experience. Each memory has a demarcation line each colored different, and is the glue. The adding of a new surface will automatically go on top and the glue, again, is of a unique hue made of that experience/memory. And who is to say that when each surface is touching a particularly strong memory is not hard to retrieve, and becomes the glue for the next experience. Maybe this is how Toshihiko Takeda would have it.

However his attention lay elsewhere, too!

Back to [Void], with the white protruding peak: Instead of the white peak as a void, as it looks, it is the surrounding color. Because of the particular angle of view in relation to the sun and the reflecting light off the snow, all that Takeda could see is the white peak. In the work the white absence become the presence, exactly as Toshiko saw it. The rest is glare, or empty, nothing to be seen, or pinched out of any detail. I start then to grasp the idea of 'detail' as Toshihiko uses it. And, as I thought, it's not always visual.

Another work, not of any specific place, but the whole world, is in fact a globe. Here a silkscreen becomes the host for a undone globe, which turns into once glued and colored, a paper ball, with the structure of the touching edges and glue giving the appearance of half deflated and half full. The ball has lines as demarcations as countries, and roughly takes on the function of a globe. On the wall, framed, is the silkscreen, with the absence the flattened out globe? In front of this is the colored ball, resembling one of those given out to children at festivals, and sits on a pedestal, and together, framed on the wall and in front as the ball, draws the title [NOVA].
It works out to be the strongest glue in the show.