笹本 晃

Beauty Lines

source: cargocollective

Aki Sasamoto is a New York-based, Japanese artist, who works in performance, sculpture, dance, and whatever more medium that takes to get her ideas across. Her works have been shown both in performing art and visual art venues in New York and abroad. Besides her own works, she has collaborated with artists in visual arts, music, and dance, and she plays multiple roles of dancer, sculptor, or director. Sasamoto co-founded Culture Push, a non-profit arts organization, in which diverse professionals meet through artist-led projects and cross-disciplinary symposia.

Sasamoto’s performance/installation works revolve around everyday gestures on nothing and everything. Her installations are careful arrangements of sculpturally altered found objects, and the decisive gestures in her improvisational performances create feedback, responding to sound, objects, and moving bodies. The constructed stories seem personal at first, yet oddly open to variant degrees of access, relation, and reflection.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: artinamericamagazine

New York-based Japanese artist Aki Sasamoto gained attention for her multimedium installation/performances at the 2010 Whitney Biennial. More recently, her first solo exhibition in New York featured humble dollar-store materials in an expansive, ephemeral installation of sound and sculpture titled “Talking in Circles in Talking.” The gallery walls were transformed into a climbing-wall-cum-whiteboard, creating a backdrop for several performances.

Sasamoto placed eight stainless-steel mixing bowls on the floor around the narrow gallery. An ice pick stood upright inside each bowl, and on its sharp tip balanced a smaller steel bowl, face down. Above these precarious contraptions hung large chunks of ice suspended in loosely woven baskets made of brightly colored shoelaces. As the ice melted, the pinging of the drips on the metal was amplified through small microphones, filling the gallery with percussive, Tin Pan Alley-like sounds. Frozen inside the ice were small items, including keys, eyeglasses and wristwatches, symbolizing the “owned” nature of objects. According to Sasamoto, at the time of death, people become the objects that they are physically close to, in the way ice becomes water—a theory she articulated during her performances.

Several large illuminated globe lamps, some humorously outfitted with brightly colored and patterned panties, were positioned here and there. Sasamoto crafted the lamps from large, translucent rubber balls attached to handheld showerheads with long, snaking plastic hoses. Two of these globes were affixed to moving chairs, which the artist made from disparate chair seats, legs and wheels. The artist’s quietly clever skill at functional assemblage extended to the woven shoelaces holding the ice, which involved the same complex technique used to make nets for buoys.

During the opening night performance, the artist allowed her multitudinous ideas to speak through her objects. Beginning with a somber, poetic eulogy, she explained that, in death, her grandfather became “an abacus with ivory beads that he kept in his shirt pocket, keeping his calculations close to his heart.” After the eulogy, Sasamoto proved adept at manipulating the emotional tenor of the room. She created a disquieting tension as she prowled through the crowded gallery, casually pushing people aside, rolling around on the altered chairs, wrapping the lamps around her body and stabbing ice picks into the wall.

Sasamoto’s work relates to the Japanese postwar movements Gutai and Mono-ha. In Gutai, artists did not so much change materials as bring them to life, often through physical interaction with them. From this perspective, Sasamoto’s everyday items are reborn with alternative uses and new realities. Mono-ha’s emphasis on dialogue between natural and man-made materials can also be found in various aspects of Sasamoto’s practice.

Transitioning moods again during the performance, the artist took on the demeanor of a weary fashion doyenne. She delivered what could be described as a panty rant, drawing diagrams on the walls and claiming that panties are a place of “pride, taste and statement.” She warned would-be leopard print panty wearers to exercise caution: “Don’t do it. If you’re not 100 percent leopard . . . don’t become an irresponsible tourist of fantasies.” At the conclusion, Sasamoto climbed the wall using the ice picks and magic markers plastered into the surface and sat on a wooden seat near the ceiling. Seemingly 100 percent leopard—and all performer—she retired to a feline’s perch, gazing down at the audience below.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: parasophiajp

笹本晃（ささもと あき）
1980年横浜生まれ、ニューヨークを拠点に活動

日本で高校を中退し、イギリスとアメリカの大学や大学院にて数学、ダンス、美術、彫刻などを学ぶ。コロンビア大学大学院美術課程修了。空間を彫刻的に分節し、その環境の中で自らの身体によるダンス、言葉、モノを用いて即興的なパフォーマンスを行う作品を数多く発表している。彼女の日常的な出来事や行為から着想され即興的な展開に見えるその作品は、実は緻密に構成されたもので、インスタレーションの静止空間と動的パフォーマンスとが複雑に交差する迷宮的物語世界となっている。横浜トリエンナーレ2008、ホイットニー・ビエンナーレ2010、第9回光州ビエンナーレ（2012）、六本木クロッシング2013（森美術館）などに参加。2014年にはニューヨークのオルタナティブスペース、ザ・キッチンにて『Sunny in the Furnace』を発表した。