R E I K O  A O Y A G I

Untitled

1995

Chapter studios, Cardiff, Wales, UK

Projection screen, insulation board on the floor and paint

Inscape Wales 4 (catalogue)

Window / wall, Susan Butler

“A preoccupation with the space of the window in Reiko Aoyagi’s work indicates her ongoing concern with dramatising an active relation between inside and outside. Sometimes this entailed the complete removal of the window surface, to create a feeling of passage and exchange in the free circulation of air. More recently, some form of partial ‘screening’ activates the window space, emphasising its function as a receptive relay, interpolating exterior phenomena into an inner space. As the artist herself conceives it, the outside, by means of this filtering, is allowed “to come into the ‘inside’ of the space and of oneself”. At the heart of the work, then, is a questioning of static identities, in favour of a deep intuition of fluidity and interchange as primary conditions of being.

The sense of the meditative in Reiko Aoyagi’s pared-down environments takes on at once a social and spiritual dimension. In the transformation of her first floor studio space, painted palest grey (the colour almost of air) and scrimmed with the translucent material of projection screening, images from the outside appeared as shadowy colour and movement rather than clearly distinct forms. These images changed with the fluctuations of natural light and one’s changing position within the room. The room provided a space of imaging and imagining that seemed like a kind of exterior mental space, inviting individual inhabitance, yet also obliging the recognition of others as parties to the experience.”