[Artist talk]

Yukari Motoyama x Guest / Takumi Fukuo (Philosopher, Critic)

Date: October 5 (sat) 16:30 - 18:00 pm

Location: Yutaka Kikutake Gallery

Capacity: 20

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Yutaka Kikutake Gallery is pleased to present Call Me by the Name, a solo show by Yukari Motoyama. This show will be held from Friday, September 20th to Saturday, October 5th, and will feature never-before-seen colored pencil on watercolor paper works, as well as a new set of pieces from the Ghost in the Cloth series.

Whether she is creating images with inverted figure-ground relationships on transparent acrylic surfaces in her Drawing paper series, or carving numbers onto wooden boards in her Plate series, Yukari Motoyama examines the conditions for creating a painting while disassembling and reconstructing the various elements related to a viewer’s experience of the work. By questioning even the standard canvas support, Motoyama has further expanded the possibilities of her pictorial practice. Of the two bodies of work which make up this show, the Ghost in the Cloth series is intended to give physical form to still-life images by producing creases and wrinkles on a cloth surface, which also plays the role of a colored ground. Motoyama says that this series first began by confronting a subject that she had been avoiding: beauty. In these new works, Motoyama has taken up several motifs that evoke strong reactions and fixed concepts for the viewer, such as flowers, the very embodiment of beauty, and knives. By utilizing embroidery, she creates shadows that traverse the colored cloth surfaces to produce the image. Within this reciprocal relationship between shadow and composition, it is perhaps possible to also perceive the role that these motifs serve in our daily lives. If these works emphasize the impression of boundaries on the colored surfaces, then by contrast the watercolor paper works demonstrate an awareness of another type of boundary that is supported by the opposite attitude.

In this work, we can see loosely defined 4x4 grid-like patterns drawn with colored pencils on watercolor paper. Each piece is numbered, and expresses the same pattern with different gradients of color. This work, exhibited alongside the vivid color contrasts of the Ghost in the Cloth series, seems to reflect the artist’s introspective attitude regarding the necessity of clearly separating things in order to understand them. The distinctive experience of the faint marks in this work is difficult to convey digitally. The fact that this work conditions the viewer to confront and observe the drawings in person is perhaps a result of Motoyama’s acute awareness of issues surrounding how paintings are created and received. These repeated investigations, which Motoyama describes as giving a physical form to an image, point to the development of a new series of gestures which reassess viewpoints and assumptions.

This exhibition offers an opportunity to reconsider Motoyama’s work to date, in particular her Ghost in the Cloth series, while also experiencing her latest artistic investigations. Motoyama herself describes the experience of seeing her own work reproduced and distributed, such as in the use of the Ghost in the Cloth series for the cover of Deleuze scholar Takumi Fukuo’s latest book Non-aesthetics, as one of the motivating factors for this show. We welcome you to come experience for yourself the latest results of Yukari Motoyama’s constantly developing, thoughtful practice.