Ungraspable
ACT (Artists Contemporary TOKAS) Vol. 5
February 11–March 26, 2023
2-4-16 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku
Tokyo 113-0033
Japan
Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS) has been supporting the activities of artists, continuously and at various stages in their careers, through open-call exhibitions, special showcases, and international exchange programs. ACT (Artists Contemporary TOKAS) is an exhibition program that focuses mainly on artists who have previously participated in any other program hosted by TOKAS. This fifth edition, featuring Ebihara Yasushi, Samejima Yui and Sudo Misa, aims to capture invisible presence, and evoke on various scales relationships between substance and imagination regarding such things.
This time, Ebihara presents freeze frames from videos; Samejima historical materials related to ancient ruins; and Sudo works based on space observation data. All of them are visualizations of fragmentary moments and phenomena, capturing things that we can perceive but not recognize, things that have gotten lost, or things that we will never be able to see, while inviting our imagination to the vast expanses of space and time that each of them involves. The works by the three artists featured here are informed by different viewpoints and techniques, but they all work as messengers of the invisible presence that lurks behind them.
Artists
Ebihara Yasushi
Born in 1976. Ebihara has been exploring the fleetingness of mass-consumed subjects and fading memories, by various means including painting, sculpture, photography and performance. The “NOISE” series that is showcased at this exhibition, consists of oil paintings of movie scenes captured in freeze frames from video tapes.
Samejima Yui
Born in 1988. Samejima focuses in her creative work on paintings themed on connections between “visible things” and “invisible things,” or visualizations of the boundary between the two realms. In the “Yobitsugi” series, she orchestrates the exhibition space with a diverse array of works themed on ancient ruins, tools that are no longer used, tradition and occultism.
Sudo Misa
Born in 1982. Sudo attempts to express in her works the “universe” as something that is difficult to grasp, while reducing her distance from it, through pictures from outer space and motifs related to astronomy. In this exhibition, Sudo unveils an installation combining motifs including the Sun, Saturn and Milky Way, based on interviews with researchers and collected data.
Organizer: Tokyo Arts and Space, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture
Supports: Wada Fine Arts, KEN NAKAHASHI, SYP Gallery