YAMASHIRO CHIKAKO, TAKANO RYUDAI

Recently I have come to think, with some frequency, that perhaps “distance” is the root of everything. Many of the world’s injustices, for instance, come about through appropriation, which could also be described as a loss of “distance.” The question of how we maintain distance from others is synonymous with that of how to live in this society. To my mind the works of Chikako Yamashiro are observations on such modalities of social and cultural distance.On the other hand, there is also purely physical “distance.” To cite perhaps the most dramatic example, this world has its origins in the Big Bang: the birth of distance. And the universe is still expanding. It is difficult though, to conjure up such scientific knowledge in our minds merely from everyday experience. Photographs are images that arise from compressing a three-dimensional space into two, but they still manifest a “depth” after that flattening. It feels to me as if those photos, allowing us to experience for ourselves distances that would not ordinarily be visible, offer a glimpse of the existence of “distances” difficult to discern in the everyday.Psychological distance and physical distance entwine in complex ways amid the constant churning and changing of the society in which we live. My hope is that this exhibition will be one of “distances” resonating with each other, in the manner that an echo resonates in a cave.

Ryudai Takano. October 2022.