Masato Kodama considers the lobby space in Gallery 9.5 of the Hotel Anteroom Kyoto as his artistic medium. Arguably not so much a conventional hotel as an abode of more permanent residence, Hotel Anteroom Kyoto rents its rooms monthly, even yearly, and the building houses an exhibition and event space for creative performance and exchange. Kodama's present sculptures on display, are concerned with light, gravity and air. For him, light is a symbol of tomorrow and potential futures, gravity represents the present and the past, and air is associated with memory.
The first work encountered, "Until Becoming a Shell," features a spiral nautilus shell, the so-called "living fossils" of the cephalopod family that have existed since the time of the formation of fossil fuels. Sitting within it is a little human figure with its hands clasped in pensive pose, elbows on knees. The fossil enclosing the figure becomes a kind of philosophical space in which to ponder, perhaps, mankind's own death and fossilization — the work becoming a peremptory sculptural metaphor for how we might conceive the larger exhibition space in its entirety.
"Spangle • big dipper" is composed of seven hip-height, thin geometric towers that are erected on tripods. At top, these hold little saucers of a silver liquid metal that reflects light and ripples from the vibrations caused by spectators as they close in on the work. The seven nodes are linked by a line of silver pebbles on the ground that create the constellation of the title — a reference to a diagrammatic way of making sense of the seeming randomness of the universe. The so-called bear shape of Ursa Major (which includes the Big Dipper constellation) relativizes the abstract astrological configuration to the natural world.