BOSTON, MA.- During his residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in spring 2007, Japanese conceptual artist Taro Shinoda drew inspiration from the century-plus-old museum’s unique atmosphere—and the unique reflection of the moon and the moonlight as it moved across the glass canopy of the museum’s interior courtyard garden and the many Asian objects on view daily in the historic galleries.

This fall, Shinoda returns to the Gardner Museum to present a new body of work—presented as part of the artist’s Lunar Reflection Transmission Technique (LRTT) series, which he conceived while watching dawn rise in the Gardner Museum courtyard during his residency in spring 2007.

The new exhibition, which does not yet have a full title, will be on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum November 5, 2009 through January 18, 2010.

Isabella Gardner left her museum and collection to the public—and to future artists—over a century ago as a place for the muses to fire the imagination and inspire artistic creativity and appreciation. This exhibition is the Gardner’s latest contemporary exhibition created through the museum’s esteemed Artists-in Residence program. Continuing Isabella Gardner’s rich legacy of patronage for living artists, the program also offers artists, curators, scholars, and the general public opportunities to view and learn from contemporary artists’ perspectives on the historic collection and Isabella Gardner’s ongoing inspiration.

Taro Shinoda
Shinoda is a Japanese conceptual artist whose work, often linked to landscapes, engages themes of desire, meditation, and adaptation. A self-taught artist whose broad base of knowledge and interest encompasses natural sciences, engineering, architecture, and landscaping, Shionda conjures machines that not only approximate nature but create whole microcosmoses in and around themselves. A recent Los Angeles exhibition was described as “Zen simplicity meets corporate efficiency” by the Los Angeles Times.

A man-made attempt to represent the universe through an ideal landscape, the traditional Japanese garden is a recurring theme in Shinoda’s work and stems from a lifelong interest: in his youth Shinoda attended a special high school to learn how to create and tend to these gardens. During a three-month residency in Los Angeles, Shinoda constructed a trailer based on an engawa, the traditional viewing platform that separates architecture, or the domestic space, from the garden. With his engawa in tow, the artist traveled to the Navajo Nation, up the Pacific coast past Big Sur, and east to Yosemite National Park, in an effort to consider how the landscape might direct man’s relationship to nature in the future. Shinoda’s work has been shown in Korea at the Busan Biennale; Tureky at the Istanbul Biennial; Limerick, Ireland at the EV+A festival; Los Angeles at the Roy and Edna Disney Calarts Theater; Tokyo at the Mori Art Museum; San Francisco at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Lithuania at the Baltic Triennale; and Yokohama, Japan, at the International Triennale of Contemporary Art. He has been an artist-in-residence at REDCAT in Los Angeles and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Taro Shinoda was born in Tokyo, where he continues to live and work.