VACANT ROOMは、戸田沙也加と湯浅万貴子による二人展「At the Thresholds」を開催いたします。

戸田沙也加は、今春の第一子出産を機に、生命が生まれ、次第に変容し、やがて失われていく過程を、これまでとは異なる実感をもって捉えるようになりました。こうした認識から、移ろう生命を人間がいかに形として留め、忘却に抗おうとするのかに関心を深めています。

本展では、この問いを起点に、剥製、造花、深海魚をモチーフとして描きます。これらはいずれも、生命あるいはその形を本来の時間や環境から切り離し、保存・再現する人間の営みと結びついています。そこには、失われていく生命を留めたいという欲望と、それを美しい形へと変換する人間の眼差しが介在しています。戸田はこれらを、生命の不在を受け止める「依代」と捉え、絵画として描くことで、保存・再現された生命の形を、作家自身の時間と身体を介してあらためて表象します。その過程では、形が受け継がれる一方、その形を生み出した時間や環境との連続性は失われ、継承と忘却が同時に生じます。

湯浅万貴子は、点描による身体像と箔・アクリル絵具の面を組み合わせ、日差しや照明に応じて前景と後景が反転し続ける《Gestalt》シリーズを制作しています。点描による身体像は、近づけば点の集積へとほどけ、距離を取れば一つの輪郭として結ばれます。湯浅はこうした像の反転を、二項の単純な置換としてではなく、知覚と運動が相互に規定し合うヴィクトーア・フォン・ヴァイツゼッカーの「ゲシュタルトクライス」に重ねています。前景と後景のあいだに恒常的な序列はなく、一方が現れると他方が退き、像は光の状態と、それを見る身体との関係のなかでその都度立ち現れます。

本展では、分割した変形パネルを支持体に用い、観者の視線と身体を一つの画面から次の画面へと導きます。画面間に生じる隙間は、像の連続性を断つと同時に、離れた形同士を観者の知覚のなかで結びつけます。観者が画面をたどるにつれて、部分と全体、図と地の関係は組み替えられていきます。

戸田が、失われていく生命をいかに形として留めうるかを見つめる一方、湯浅は、光や身体の移動によって像の現れ方が変化していく過程を扱います。「At the Thresholds」は、生命とその表象、像と知覚のあいだに生じる複数の境界を、二人の異なる実践から捉える試みです。

また、本展の関連企画として、10月18日（日）に現代美術家・岡田裕子をゲストに迎え、戸田沙也加、湯浅万貴子とのトークイベントを開催いたします。

岡田裕子は、映像、写真、インスタレーション、パフォーマンスなど多様な表現手法を通じて、恋愛、結婚、出産、子育てといった経験を起点に、ジェンダーや家族、女性を取り巻く社会のあり方を問い続けてきました。

当日は、両作家による出展作品の解説に続き、岡田自身の制作や経験を交えながら、三者それぞれの制作の背景や問題意識について対話を展開します。生命の保存と喪失、身体と知覚をめぐる本展の主題を手がかりに、個人的な経験と芸術表現、身体と社会との関係について考察を深めます。終盤には質疑応答を予定しています。

VACANT ROOM is pleased to present At the Thresholds, a two-person exhibition by Sayaka Toda and Makiko Yuasa.

Following the birth of her first child this spring, Sayaka Toda has come to perceive with a renewed immediacy the process by which life emerges, gradually transforms, and eventually disappears. From this awareness, she has deepened her interest in how human beings seek to preserve transient life in visible form and to resist its passage into oblivion.

Taking this question as a point of departure, Toda presents works depicting taxidermy, artificial flowers, and deep-sea fish. Each of these motifs is connected to human practices of preserving or reproducing life—or its form—by removing it from its original temporal and environmental context. Embedded within these practices is both a desire to hold on to what is disappearing and a human gaze that transforms it into an object of beauty. Toda regards these motifs as yorishiro—vessels through which the absence of life may be received—and, by rendering them in painting, represents forms of life that have already been preserved or reproduced once again through the time and body of the artist. In this process, form may be carried forward even as continuity with the time and environment that produced it is lost, allowing inheritance and forgetting to occur simultaneously.

Makiko Yuasa’s Gestalt series combines pointillist representations of the body with surfaces of metal leaf and acrylic paint, creating images in which foreground and background continually reverse in response to daylight and artificial illumination. Viewed up close, the body dissolves into an accumulation of dots; from a distance, those same dots cohere into a single contour. Yuasa relates this reversal not to a simple exchange between two fixed terms, but to Viktor von Weizsäcker’s concept of the Gestaltkreis, in which perception and movement mutually determine one another. No stable hierarchy exists between figure and ground: as one emerges, the other recedes, and the image appears anew each time through the relation between changing conditions of light and the body of the viewer.

For this exhibition, Yuasa employs divided, irregularly shaped panels that lead the viewer’s gaze and body from one pictorial surface to the next. The gaps between the panels interrupt the continuity of the image while simultaneously allowing separated forms to be connected within the viewer’s perception. As the viewer follows the work across its surfaces, the relations between part and whole, figure and ground, are continuously reorganized.

Where Toda considers how disappearing life might be retained in form, Yuasa examines the way an image’s appearance shifts through changes in light and the movement of the body. At the Thresholds brings these two distinct practices into relation in order to consider the multiple boundaries that arise between life and its representation, and between image and perception.

As a related program of At the Thresholds, VACANT ROOM will host an artist talk on Sunday, October 18, featuring contemporary artist Hiroko Okada in conversation with exhibiting artists Sayaka Toda and Makiko Yuasa.

Working across video, photography, installation, and performance, Okada has explored questions surrounding gender, family, and the social conditions affecting women, often drawing on experiences of love, marriage, childbirth, and parenting.

The event will begin with presentations by Toda and Yuasa on their exhibited works, followed by a conversation with Okada about the experiences and concerns underlying their respective practices. Taking the exhibition’s themes of the preservation and loss of life, the body, and perception as points of departure, the discussion will consider the relationships between personal experience and artistic expression, as well as between the body and society. An audience Q&A will follow.