Five Elements: Lake Superior, Eagle River, No. 53552.01
Designer: Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, born 1948)
Manufacturer: Mihoya Glass Co. Ltd.
Date: 2011
Dimensions:
H: 6 in. (15.2 cm); W: 3 in. (7.6 cm); Depth: 3 in. (7.6 cm)
Medium: Optical glass, cast, assembled, with inlaid black and white transparency film.
Classification: Glass
Credit Line: Museum Purchase
Object number: 2012.8
Label Text:With deity or Buddha both vanished from this day and age, in what can I take refuge? Just perhaps the only object of devotion I have left is the origin of my consciousness, the sea. And so in this Five-Element Pagoda made of optical glass I enshrine a seascape within the water sphere.
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s sculpture is shaped like a five-story Japanese Buddhist pagoda set on an elongated wooden pedestal. It references miniature shrines made of rock crystal, a material revered in the early Buddhist world for its purity and its ability to transmit light. The five stacked elements represent, from bottom to top: the earth (cube), water (sphere), fire (pyramid), wind (hemisphere) and space (tear-drop shape)—together symbolizing the cosmos. The optical glass of the pagoda amplifies the seascape image within—a photograph of Lake Superior—alluding to the concept of infinity within the earthly realm.
The encased film transparency is from Sugimoto’s ongoing “Seascapes” series of black and white photographs, his best-known work.
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s sculpture is shaped like a five-story Japanese Buddhist pagoda set on an elongated wooden pedestal. It references miniature shrines made of rock crystal, a material revered in the early Buddhist world for its purity and its ability to transmit light. The five stacked elements represent, from bottom to top: the earth (cube), water (sphere), fire (pyramid), wind (hemisphere) and space (tear-drop shape)—together symbolizing the cosmos. The optical glass of the pagoda amplifies the seascape image within—a photograph of Lake Superior—alluding to the concept of infinity within the earthly realm.
The encased film transparency is from Sugimoto’s ongoing “Seascapes” series of black and white photographs, his best-known work.
DescriptionCast glass sculpture consisting of five stacked geometric elements (bottom to top): a cube, a sphere with a black and white transparency of a seascape sandwiched vertically between its two hemispheres, a pyramidal shape, a hemisphere, and a drop-shaped element.
Not on view
In Collection(s)