I’ve been to a total of 3 exhibitions during CoViD, and I felt like I didn’t want to miss this one. I stopped by Amia Yokoyama’s exhibition in Highland Park at In Lieu Gallery where as I left they recommended that I check out the the press release. But I wanted to record my initial impressions first. I’m also going to refer back to 2 instances where I saw her work last in the last 2 years:
I guess Amia comes from animation, but when I think about her output (which of course is multi-dimensional), I think that her sculptural forms are so consistently satisfying!
To be quite specific, I think it has something to do with the simple but ideal use of white high fire porcelain glazes that I think of as either 'celadons' or 'crystalline glazes' (I could be totally wrong on what's being used). I have to say that of all of the ways that I've seen ceramicists pair this kind of faint hue, mostly transparent glaze for a delicate effect on a particular form, THIS is my favorite use of that kind of glaze with the trippy drippy look.
I first saw these small-medium sized figurine works in an artist-run exhibition called “I Got What I Got” at Dread Lounge. At this height and size they did seem like little stop motion clay avatars (more crafted with care than rendered for consumption by an 'Otaku'.) They inspire a kind of glee that’s borderline cutesy but not over detailed, in their, gloppy, cartoony state of suspended animation stuckness.
Their sense of gravity in combination with the carefree glaze is so tactile that they remind me of the feeling of being a little kid wrapping oneself in a big blanket and pretending it’s a big wizard robe when you wiggle your arms... what am I trying to get at here? There's wonderful fantasy in there being no discerning separation between drip and body; a frozen moment, that still gives impression that it's perhaps just moving really really slowly, like a kind of mindfulness.
Here’s what a crystalline glaze looks like, something only possible in a very controlled high fire environment. It’s here, on one of my inspiration walls, framed. If I could, I’d probably have a whole wall of glaze tests. I guess this is the closest I get to having one of those aura photographs.
So yeah, I love this surface affect, the ways glazes ooze off of the forms, then makes little fancy transformations in the firing process where it pools, and finding where the glaze gets milky and alchemical is way more fun and subtle than just some perfect round vessel. The cloudiness as well as where crystalline forms would appear would not be on the bodies of the ’slime girls', but it’s below them on the ground that has fallen off of the drips, appearing to have some dimension but is completely flat, glass smooth.
And I like the semi-cult status that these characters inhabit as the 'slime girls' show up on t-shirts worn by friends in this crew of artists. Even in the writing I've come across that accompanies her work, there’s always been a sense of promiscuous words/ideas, a connection of minds all going in and out of the world building. The texts tend to be amorphous too, in multiple voices where that’s something more punk than simply a male gaze.
At JACE in 2018, the exhibit, really the furniture for watching the screening, blew my mind.
It was cozy and bombastic at the same time, but to be honest I can’t remember the video or the details of the wall pieces that well because, comparatively, it was much more distant and set based and maybe somewhat robotic (from what I remember) than the items and people lounging about in that room which seemed to blur audience and installation.
Even now I’m thinking to myself, where the line was between fashion one might wear in the videos vs. what one might one wear out at a party with friends, would there be a noticeable difference in fabulousness? Perhaps real life has less props, and spaces get more crowded. If I knew this bunch of folx were just hanging around here on any given night, I’d probably show up pretty regularly, it was incredibly inviting for involving so many constructed things. In my imagination, this is a pretty rad pad that someone has been living within during quarantine:
I noticed the JACE website was down, so here’s the text that accompanied the red experience:
Her installations tend to exude a totalizing color, and the texts seem to continue riffing off of the pleasure of creation.
So I guess now, we can enter the latest works that just came down last Saturday at In Lieu Gallery, which made me think of a Paul Thek solo exhibition with neon green vitrines at PACE gallery in NY who also had these messier, explosively collaborative practices across the ocean over in Europe.
Taking in the space, it's another aesthetic revelation! Finally! Art that actually works best in a white cube (for projection, for multiplying the surfaces of cubes, for looking weird...)
I had been anticipating seeing the white dripping anime shapely figures of porcelain again as well checking out the animations where giant fractal figures walk in step with butterflies and energy, and a romantically animated ‘Tramp Stamp’. (Note: I too have a ’tramp stamp’ tattoo, it’s a bubble level, and a portion of it is a bright yellow green and appears to have a light source that comes from nowhere, but I think of that space on my body, since I can’t see it, as a place where something animated and unexpected can happen. It’s a spot on my body that makes me laugh, and it reminds me to not take myself too seriously.)
What I didn’t expect to see was a wonderfully playful and coy fox. It was so distinctive that I wondered if it would it be possible to, or if there was a reason not to, give each digital figure and ‘slime girl’ as much personality as the Fox and the… pinched pot animal form that I think was a dog?
What was immediately successful was the feeling of digital angels via video installation framing (any time the videos curved around figures it reminded me of inverted wings, and Neon Genesis Evangelion). There were ambiguous sculptures at the base of the vitrines, which neither grounded nor elucidated forms that tended to whip around each other. But I liked them enough, like the way that some beaches are made up of larger shells, not just fine sand.
This concept I'm thinking might be upside down, but the warped green reflection reminded me of a cool toned version of a sun flare burst, the kind that can supposedly take out the Internet and Bluetooth temporarily. I want this kind of disruption, like an EMT blast. The quiet emptiness of this gallery during CoViD didn’t seem right. The images were so sharp, the perspectives so jarring, I wanted to be bombarded with music by SOPHIE or Autechre mixing with the Final Fantasy 7 theme and loud dripping, but of course that would be cruel to the person doing the gallery sitting. What’s the binaural version of Cardi B made up of ASMR noises of hair whooshing and the magic wand adult toy?
Unfortunately the maker in me couldn’t help but note all of the construction choices that stuck out in the silence.
I wish the plexiglas didn’t remind me of the fragility of the works; their presentation seemed to suggest examining the sculptures as if they could rotate, because of how they appeared to float and also felt more like a display than a space one could infinitely melt out into. I imagined that these figures could be in fountains, that they could blink anime eyes or be given a specimen tag.
I wish there could have been a taut white fabric obscuring the plexiglas from above that was distorting the projection upon the walls, similar to the treatment of covering the edges of the flatscreen tv display, so that I would only be aware that the light source was coming from there, not how it was refracting and bending. I wanted there to be some secrets, something not able to be seen. Perhaps then I’d be left to imagine another worldly explanation of the digital bleeding and morphing beyond crisp frames.
I also flat out wanted to take out the paintings, which stuck out in the darkness. They felt heavy with pieces of ceramic that felt quote tacked on/outlined, when maybe I wanted to see each piece of ceramic have the same bodily sense of gravity; perhaps appearing sunken into a substrate that made sense being vertical on a wall rather than being on a thing that appears to help make it look 'mountable' on a wall. It looked like a size I like to work in, small enough to not take up space, but all of the other works really demanded space, which meant that these seemed to be more about fitting these in, when these in between spaces could have just been quieter. I wish that instead of feeling like a sculpey version of a Matisse cut out, it could have been more of an obscured figure not dictated by a rectangular box, maybe more like an organic form that takes a moment to sort out what it is, like that one diver who spends a lot of time trying to detect the camouflaged creature in ‘My Octopus Teacher’.
The exhibition puts me in the mindset of spirits or things not here, or Jennifer Moon talking about BEI gut faeries… Even without anyone else in this space I could imagine someone rocking a related t-shirt; I could imagine pulling out a beer from a metal container on the ground filled with ice and the cool perspiration of the can of beer in my hand… something about this set of works feels like a friendly party would complete the work, give it its full context; not that I was supposed to have reverence for the works as if I was at, say, Matthew Marks Gallery. The little ‘slime girls’ are somehow too aware for that kind of pared down minimalist treatment even though they are worth giving that kind of attention to them.
The figures themselves encapsulate not only a color, as the whole exhibition exuded a color much like Amia’s red exhibition, this time blues and greens, but this one had the personality of that gushy 💦 emoji since digital light and space bled and glaze worked in a tromploi way.
The simulated wetness of the figurines that are larger than a trinket, and this time, featuring more than one figure, means that we have here a multiplicity of cuddle puddles. I bet there’d also be no problem finding friends of the artist to write about the project to give further mediums to supplant the work that is here. How many writers could there be? I think there could have been a different writer, one for each day the exhibition ran.
But whose collection would these sculptures be in? I’m thinking the 2016 Korean film The Handmaiden where... [spoiler alert]... just kidding, I won't ruin anything for you, go watch that film with no expectations, it’s great!
What I guess I’m trying to get at is that I’m not convinced this work is either for populist consumption, or for rich people who buy art as investments, but that the artworks, and the opportunity to exhibit them, are like representations of a group of friends that ‘get’ each other… like an inside joke or series of photographs of a trip to a cabin or Joshua Tree where many psychedelics were taken and very good times were had both on the way there and actually at the destination. Like Thek, I think of Amia as an artists’ artist. This is maybe why I made it a point to want to see the work in person.
These ‘slime girls’ seems to be a stand in for folx immersed in their own world, too busy to make it about mass consumption like an episode of Vida, where the demographic ends up actually being middle aged men that live in the Midwest, where the point of its existence seems much more to be about hiring POC actors/actresses than it is to appeal to them as a target audience (hint, maybe making characters that represent some kind of vague anti-gentrification activists where it's actually filmed in a part of town that actually shut out a lot of art galleries and culture vultures due to actual gentrification means you probably won’t get this demographic to vouch for the ‘realness' of your show nor get a bunch of friends together to watch it... It's the tone deaf kind of 'meta')
Nor does the work ever seem like it has a deeper mission to educate/expand your mind, that it will explain to you the values inherent in some kind of sub-culture demanding respect and body positivity. This is gonna be a fairly odd tangent, but did anyone else find that one ‘Transparent’ episode in Season 4 where Ali visits Ramallah kindof cringy where she meets up with a whole group of Palestinian activists? The feel of these scenes are more telling than showing, a kind of preaching to the choir (obviously to convey that the producers have done their homework) but it comes off as rigid and forced breaking the narrative angle all of the other episodes are shot through. You wonder if they really winged it and had no idea what they were getting themselves into or felt like they just needed to pay lip service in an attempt to avoid any online criticism about just going to Israel and not mentioning the occupation of Palestinian land.
These are both examples of well-connected producers that want to expand the opportunities for POC, and yet I feel like they have to rely on attention-grabbing sex scenes or online articles about how casual activism can be, where it's as easy as contacting your local activists!
This is a bit clunky, but I'm trying to explain that you get the opposite here, what on the surface appears to be an attention-grabbing busty anime body, upon slower, closer looking, is a matter of overall exquisite craft. Really what I see instead is a different kind of story entirely, not about where these 'slime girls' come from, but one about how this artist spends much of her time crafting something ultimately funny and curious. (Another case in point is the fine line silvery details of cheesy flames and the caring ways that the ceramics are tied together with soft material.)
I think that talking about bodies by representing them only vis-à-vis onion peeling digital worlds and anime tropes is to suspend it all in the realm of speculation, not to actually be relegated to these realms.
They’re the backgrounds to our actual space where we might be seen leaning on each other, making each other laugh in that ugly uncontrolled too loud way, taking a break, or egging each other on with more and more imaginative scenarios. They're the gut bacteria that secretly makes up 80% of what we thought was our very unique personality.
I’m looking back at my photos and something I noticed then, actually appears in the photos too. It's that amazing digital-lookingness of this tangible fox. It was the first thing that captivated me when I walked in the space, so I think it should be what I leave you with at the end of this ‘review’. The style of this thing… It’s another favorite art thing... the way you might come across some contemporary art assuming its digital, and then well, obviously, it's not, but it still feels digital.
To see the piece in 3D, cross your eyes until the two images blend; you’ll know it works when its voluptuous booty comes out at ya. This was totally a show worth seeing in person, and now this is the next best thing you get until she exhibits again.
