Arata came of artistic age when sculpture had yet to experience the same rejuvenation that had returned painting to the forefront of contemporary commerce (and discourse) in the early 80s. His earliest major works – the Monet Haystack and Marco Polo installations among them – combined formal and autobiographical elements (Arata had worked as an engineering draughtsman, and the 3D cross-section structure of the urns, ships, and haystacks derive directly) with art historical and historical references, and a prescient concern with globalism, issues of sustainability, and relational aesthetics – the latter at this point limited to an awareness of the physicality of sculptural installations. But soon to blossom and mutate in extraordinary directions. Remember (2009) consists of an array of folk-artish paintings of the hairdos of anonymous possible victims of a 1980’s LA-based photographer/serial killer. For the Catholic League, Flock (2005), consists of a herd of sculpted sheep, dilated vaginal/anal/cloacal orifices ready for relational aestheticization; the occasional hovering gold donut halo designating virginal status. In addition to what Arata refers to as the “playful physics” of transposing an ephemeral atmospheric optical phenomenon into distinctly corporeal incarnations, the elaboration of the stages of their life cycle, and the addition of google eyes (and in some cases handguns) to render them sentient (if not always so friendly) entities, the Rainbow variations also absorb and twist a range of formalist art historical concerns of the PET SPACES,Greenbergian post-painterly, Minimalist, and Light & Space movements.
