Kaori Yamashita
23 Jan - 15 Feb 2015
KAORI YAMASHITA
letter from the distant beyond
23 January - 15 February 2015
Kaori Yamashita’s installations incorporate specific features of the current spatial surroundings and encompass a variety of artistic media: three-dimensional drawings, small-format sculptures, drawings on paper, photographs, objects constructed from mortar and papier-mâché, or wall tiles. One frequently recurring motif is structures reminiscent of constellations of bricks: those elementary, omnipresent components of architecture, which may stand metonymically for the entirety of our structurally designed environment.
In Yamashita’s work, however, they are present in the shape of their ‘absence’, for the filigree objects appear as if the artist has removed the stones and set the remaining coherent links made from mortar into the exhibition space like an exoskeleton. In this way Yamashita inverts the relationship and hierarchy of meaning between the actual and the merely underlying architectural structure, and indicates that one important aspect in her work is emptiness, the un-depicted, things caught in a state of floating between completion and decay.
In letter from the distant beyond Yamashita stages a kind of classical museum situation in the exhibition space – and shows this as a place for conglomerated artefacts, sometimes disturbing or apparently only half-complete. In face of this ensemble, the viewer is left uncertain whether something is in the process of evolving or in passing here – a feeling that can be transferred to our memories as well, and which the artist wishes to express.
Kaori Yamashita lives and works in Tokyo and Berlin.
She is currently a grantee of the Pola Art Foundation in the context of our International Studio Programme.
letter from the distant beyond
23 January - 15 February 2015
Kaori Yamashita’s installations incorporate specific features of the current spatial surroundings and encompass a variety of artistic media: three-dimensional drawings, small-format sculptures, drawings on paper, photographs, objects constructed from mortar and papier-mâché, or wall tiles. One frequently recurring motif is structures reminiscent of constellations of bricks: those elementary, omnipresent components of architecture, which may stand metonymically for the entirety of our structurally designed environment.
In Yamashita’s work, however, they are present in the shape of their ‘absence’, for the filigree objects appear as if the artist has removed the stones and set the remaining coherent links made from mortar into the exhibition space like an exoskeleton. In this way Yamashita inverts the relationship and hierarchy of meaning between the actual and the merely underlying architectural structure, and indicates that one important aspect in her work is emptiness, the un-depicted, things caught in a state of floating between completion and decay.
In letter from the distant beyond Yamashita stages a kind of classical museum situation in the exhibition space – and shows this as a place for conglomerated artefacts, sometimes disturbing or apparently only half-complete. In face of this ensemble, the viewer is left uncertain whether something is in the process of evolving or in passing here – a feeling that can be transferred to our memories as well, and which the artist wishes to express.
Kaori Yamashita lives and works in Tokyo and Berlin.
She is currently a grantee of the Pola Art Foundation in the context of our International Studio Programme.