When visitors enter The Container, the micro-gallery housed inside Bross hair salon in Tokyo's Nakameguro neighborhood, they'll be faced with a faintly illuminated photograph that divides the space into two. The artwork, which forms the center of Suzanne Mooney's solo show, titled "A Few Light Taps Upon the Pane, No One Turns, No Reply," depicts a south Dublin apartment block in a halted construction site, which is obscured by tarpaulin printed with a rendering of the yet-to-be-realized finished building.
Representative of the Celtic Tiger — Ireland's rapidly growing economy of the mid-1990s through the 2000s — and the country's subsequent economic collapse in 2008, the tarpaulin's image depicts an idealized vision of modern living: Chic young professionals lean against balcony rails, their iPhones in hand.
Mooney, who won the 2015 Aesthetica Art Prize for a technically similar piece, utilizes a unique printing process to create sensuous images that exist as much in ink as they do in light. Printed directly on an acrylic pane with varying levels of opacity and lit from behind, this exhibition's eponymous work transforms the gallery into a shipping-container-sized light box.
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