“The Elastic Edges” by KAITO Itsuki from 20230325 to 20230416
Ritsuki Fujisaki Gallery is pleased to announce “The Elastic Edges” a solo exhibition by KAITO Itsuki from March 25 to April 16, 2023.
Artist’s CV and website
Interview by Kuma Foundation
https://kuma-foundation.org/news/6030/
https://kuma-foundation.org/news/6816/
La réception et l’assimilation de ce qui fit
What distinguishes Itsuki Kaito’s works is that they are seemingly surrealistic and irrelevant figures and signs, however, they are narrative art which is clearly organized and systematically developed based on her experience and recognition about reality.
The title of this exhibition, “The Elastic Edges” refers to mapping of the boundaries between self and others, and the possibility of the existence of such relationships.
She has used its motifs with clear signs and meanings in her own mythological system. The limbs in restraints, the knife game, the penguin bag, the pot with the sad face… each of the representations in this exhibition is a representation of the boundary between self and others. Each of these representations alludes to the boundaries between self and others, especially the dichotomies and its boundaries between physical and psychological, experience and memory, pleasure and discomfort, male and female, and so on.
The well-known cultural anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, in his major work “Les Mythologiques“, points out that various structures, including dichotomies, can be found in mythological systems, and that they drive the narratives.
However, it should be noted that the structural analysis towards rituals of the Bororo tribe in South America are not equivalent to the rituals themselves. In other words, interpreting her paintings from an aesthetic point of view is not the main focus of this exhibition and we should attempt to touch the fertility of her practice in a different way from interpreting them linguistically.
In a lecture given in 1960, shortly before the book above was published, he stated,
“We imagine the anthropologist more as a model of the engineer who conceives and assembles a machine through a series of rational operations. But the machine must work. Logical certainty is not enough. The possibility of trying the inner experiences of others on ourselves is only one of the means by which the natural sciences and the humanities alike can attain the ultimate satisfaction based on that experience that they feel the need for. Perhaps it is not so much a proof as a guarantee.”
The “WE” who may be the “OTHERS” to her, approaching and possibly assimilating unrelated visual collages and the bricoraged narratives, encourages a reconsideration of boundaries through mythology.
Moreover, this can be supposed to be one of the true purposes of visual art.
