Takuro Someya Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition “umbra” featuring works by Yazu Yoshitaka.

Yazu Yoshitaka was born in 1980 in Osaka and graduated from the Kyoto City University of Arts with a degree in sculpture in 2004. As one of the core members of the artist group Antenna during his student days he became involved in the various fields of project planning, film, 3D sculpture, and painting. He left Antenna in 2007 and began his solo career with the exhibition“Cosmos – Service – Home” in September of that year. Using the mediums of sculpture, painting, photography, and installation, Yazu explores the universal theme of “sensing God”, common among humans of all races and ethnicities, and experiments with the expression of “God” as it exists within the contemporary notion of common sense. Past exhibitions include “Holy and Common” (TSCA) and “THE CORONA” (Art Space Niji).

Since 2008, Yazu Yoshitaka has remained active both in Tokyo and in Kyoto where he is based and where he also regularly exhibits his work. His works hint at the infinite potential that exists in the interim space between relative opposites: black and white, light and shadow, existence and nonexistence. The gap that exists between vague concepts, the words used to express them, and the people who utter those words is ever-expanding, and we can see an intention through his works to encourage recognition of the notion of misconception as a form of understanding. Even without the physical utterance of words, there is always a margin of error that occurs in, for example, the e-mails we use on a daily basis, and the best method to convey to the other party that the message received was perfectly understood is to respond with the exact same message. However, there is also the obscure concept of an “unknown somebody” that, in order to be conveyed, has been assigned by us humans the forms of religions, fairies, monsters, and ghosts. This stream of thought differs from science, philosophy, math, and other methods for and concepts of understanding the world, and certainly takes us in a new direction.

From the artist’s statement:

On display at the upcoming exhibition, in addition to the 2D series “unknown” that was shown at the pre-exhibition for “umbra” at TSCA in Tokyo, will be the video piece “umbra”, made as a collaboration with Okita Tomohiro. In this 3D CG video, the first experiment in this format by the artist, images that usually are viewed in a casual manner appear as fakes. The world created using CG formulas seems at a glance to be a perfectly controlled world, but in passing through the viewers that experience it, the animism within the motifs produces an unknown world that is beyond control. Using the most recent 3D film technology, a mysterious structure, suspended midair, suddenly manifests in the empty exhibition space. Stereoscopic films present the ability to perceive the interim between existence and nonexistence through human optical illusion. As can be seen in the visuals in the film, the organic materials treated as motifs evoke objects used in prayer rituals, a practice that has been part of the daily lives of humans since ancient times. Even in the contemporary Japanese society of today, where religion no longer has a significant impact on our daily lives, this recalls within us a historical background rooted in our core.

Yazu’s new works come out of a genre of art that holds no precursory answers in the space between induction and deduction, and continue his pursuit to express the “something unknown”.