Although I enjoyed the art at the Howard Greenberg gallery and found all the works to be interesting and well done, the photograph, “A Maquette for a Multiple Monument for B29:Bockscar, from the series “Exposed in a Hundred Suns”, stood out to me in particular. The aspect that struck me most were the mirrors, for I have never before seen art like this! I most definitely did not have the same feelings as I did standing in front of the art verses viewing a scaled down version of it in an email.
“A Maquette for a Multiple Monument for B29:Bockscar, from the series “Exposed in a Hundred Suns” by Takashi Arai is a very large photograph. Actually, I’m going to change that. It is 100 square photos all put together to make one large, wide and long image. It is displayed on its own wall in the gallery. The 100 different photos are unique in the fact that they are all printed on mirrored pieces. It was only when I went up close that was able to make out the exact image spread across the mirrors, and, behold- fighter planes. One of them had letters on it, which after flipping around in my head, spelled out NAGASAKI. I was looking at an image of the bomber that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. After the fact, I discovered that the artist is Japanese. I find it so interesting that Arai chose to portray these planes on mirrors, better yet, 100 of them. As I stood in front of the mirrors, I kept alternating between seeing the planes and seeing my own reflection. This forced me to place myself in the shoes of the people who went through World War II, of the people who were killed in Nagasaki, of the people who survived and whose lives were changed forever, of the bomber. According to History.com, the explosion wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. Just like it was a massive task for Arai to create the work of art, so too the bombing had massive effects. Hundreds of mirrors and hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of lives changed forever…
