2024.6.22

Patterns and Distance
Makoto Ito, Shoko Masunaga, Kota Sasaki, Nao Osada, Yuka Hotta

Makoto Ito
Ito’s formal yet light-hearted and humorous sculptural works created using diverse materials embody the possibilities of contemporary sculpture.
Blue Sky (produced in 2017) is one of the pieces that draw inspiration from distant scenery visible from a certain location and portray it as something touchable within easy reach. The work uses a photographed bird deterrent attached to a remote power cable as a motif. It expresses the scale of distance as it converts the miniature version of the actual scenery into a sculpture.

Shoko Masunaga
With painting as her starting point, Masunaga employs diverse production techniques. Her works, which emphasize their relationships with the surrounding environment and space, possess variable and interchangeable qualities.
Session (produced in 2023) is composed of a combination of several shaped canvases. Their colors, lines, and patterns softly link together, as if the adjacent canvases respond to each other, forging rich relationships.

Kota Sasaki
Using 3DCG, Sasaki creates paintings that intersect two and three dimensions through the depiction of spaces such as an atelier or a gallery.
In Untitled, a striped pattern is drawn on a thickly painted canvas. The pattern (two dimensions) is painted onto a rugged-surfaced support structure (three dimensions), creating visual fluctuations caused by different viewing angles. The method produces an illusion of compressed imagery on the canvas, making viewers conscious of the act of seeing.

Nao Osada
Osada creates works using silkscreen to print the surface elements of a familiar object onto the surface of a material different from that of the original item.
In Surface Preparation (Sandpaper 3M), the images on the front and back of a sandpaper sheet are printed on two identical brass pieces, which can be superimposed on one another. Osada’s works uncover ephemerality in trivial objects discarded in our daily lives and elevate them into something poetic. They inspire humble awareness in viewers, unsettling their sense of reality.

Yuka Hotta
With painting as her starting point, Hotta’s creation is centered around drawings and installations. In her recent works, she has experimented to use diverse media as intermediaries to produce drawings and incorporated printing as a method of expression.
Titled C, the series traces an eyeless exploration depicted using bodily senses. Its free and relaxed strokes rely on animated sensation to render images evocative of breathing.