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Junko Yamamoto

STATEMENT

 

My recent work is part of ongoing series loosely organized through my meditations on the notion of shunyata, the Sanskrit word for "emptiness". My pieces estrange the concept from its common Buddhist associations in order to explore the perpetually irreducible tensions between emptiness and fullness in terms of the forms and apparent borders of human consciousness.

We can only imagine the emptiness expressed by shunyata in relation to an attendant conception of fullness or wholeness - an elementary insight that serves as a starting point for me as I seek to puzzle through the boundaries of consciousness, knowledge, memory and our sense of delimited self - possession ( as against understanding of a universe or whole consciousness).

 

My process, which typically involves vacillating between painting layers of color and shape on canvas and using rollers to create the inherently imprecise and suggestive vertical lines which texture most of my works, is consonant for me with our constant "push an pull" of material and conceptual space and the nearly-indistinguishable layering of our conscious experience. Such layering is further suggested by the use of a range of pastels drawn from the patterns of clothing traditionally warm under more brightly colored kimonos - colors which were inscribed in my thinking from a young age.

 

The circular forms that (re)appear and disappear in all of the pieces signal for me both the thresholds of consciousness and interconnectedness my creations attempt to inhabit as well as my indebtedness to the forms of Japanese popular culture - particularly comic books - with which I grew up. The comic book trap of dialogue bubbles invoke our primary communicative gestures and the ways in which repertoires of pop cultural imagery help to shape and structure our most basic expressions of consciousness, even as we recognize in them am attempt to escape the "reality" of the rest of our conscious lives. The perpetual openness of these bubbles invites a kind of play, a precarious undecidability and possibility that marks all our ways of knowing and communicating.

 

Junko Yamamoto