SUPPORT SYSTEM SCULPTURAL INSTALLATION - SASCHA YAMASHITA

Sascha Yamashita –FAILED DRAWINGS

Sascha appears courtesy of Gallery Atsui, where he is both a co-founder and a director.

His installation FAILED DRAWINGS (working title) suspends slightly over-scaled, crumpled drawings from an upper corner of the gallery wall. The crumpled forms seem to have been collected from either an oversized toddlers playroom floor, or from a writers typewriter-side wastepaper basket – evidence of the effort to try over and over again to get the opening lines just right. This illusion to writing, literature and therefore narrative plays off of the highly narrative content in Lisa's work. Furthermore, the crumpled paper forms suspended from the wall seem as if they have floated over on the billowing clouds from the mural, connecting the two works in both a conceptual and a formal manner. Ironically, given the illusion in this artwork to artistic failure, Sascha is known by his peers for (amongst other things) having very good drawing skills.

This work is in keeping with Sascha's minimal aesthetic and his work with repetition, everyday materials and the accumulation of simple materials. In this installation, the 2-dimensional discarded drawings have been given second life, repurposed and re-contextualized as a sculptural installation - the forms elevated from the floor or the wastepaper basket to floating ephemeral clouds of inspiration.

Sascha's work in it's current form will be on view until Monday, June 15th, 7:00 p.m. The next artist to work on the installation is Christopher Donnelly who will be working over top of and around Sascha's work.

For more information on Gallery Atsui go to: www.galleryatsui.com.

Stone Soup at Grace-Gallery, First Week Evite for June 12th, 2009

Featured Artists: Lisa Birke and Sascha Yamashita. See Photos from Week One of Stone Soup in the Vantage Art Projects Flickr Collections:

Stone Soup Exhibition at Grace-Gallery - First Opening Friday, June 12/09

Grace-Gallery is the blank canvas for the upcoming Stone Soup Exhibition. (Grace-Gallery @ 2nd and Main, Vancouver, BC). Two Progressive, Site Specific Artworks will be made in the Gallery over the course of the exhibition and reworked each week by a new set of artists.

Lisa Birke (mural) and Sascha Yamashita (installation) - Friday, June 12th (8pm til late)

Weakhand (mural) and Christopher Donnelly (installation) - Friday, June 19th (8pm til late)

Christian Nicolay (mural) and Rebecca Donald (installation) - Friday, June 26th (8pm til late)

Curated by Jennifer Mawby with Grace-Gallery Rachel Zottenberg and co-produced with Sherri Kajiwara.

The folk legend of the STONE SOUP has direct application for our current economic times. In the story, famine has hit a small village. Each villager believes that there is no food to eat in their own cupboards. Then, a savvy stranger rolls into town with a story that he will make a meal for them all from just a magic stone that he carries with him. By encouraging the villagers to each bring a little something to add to the stone soup (such as a carrot or a potato) the stranger is able to create a nurturing meal for all to share.

News media is announcing to viewers on a daily basis about how tough the current economic climate is for us. Stock values have plummeted, and companies are in a no-growth and down-sizing period. People are losing their jobs and it appears to be famine season. To combat the belief that times are too tough, the stone soup fable can be applied to create recession-proof thinking in both art-making and the general public zeitgeist.

The STONE SOUP exhibition is a model for socially interactive, sustainable, and fiscally responsible art production using a group of artists to collaboratively and incrementally create an exhibition that nourishes all. The transient nature of the artwork as it evolves also reminds us that nothing truly is permanent, and that “this too will pass”.

Click for Full Curatorial Proposal

Click for Exhibition Schedule

"Before/After" by Sascha Yamashita - FRESH PICKS V1E11

"Double, double toil and trouble,

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble".

Providing Shakespeare's witches with fuel for the fire must have been demanding work, and the wood-stoked pot over which they said their ritual incantation holds water for our new FRESH PICKS EDITION.

"Before/After" by Sascha Yamashita reminds us that an artist's work is thankfully never done. This stunning photograph from his "Before/After" Wood Pile installation references the following ancient Zen Buddhist proverb: “Before enlightenment - chop wood carry water. After enlightenment - chop wood, carry water.”

Through considering daily tasks and rituals in an artful manner, Sascha reminds us of the work ethic and repetitive hands-on-labour traditionally a very noble part of an artist's working life. This ritualizing of artmaking has a long tradition, including such conceptual trail blazers as Bruce Nauman and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Nauman said of this own understanding of art work and repetition that if “I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing must be art” - suggesting his belief in the power of art to ritualize labour and mark it as important. In her 1970's "Maintenance Art Performances", Ukeles also turned repetitive “house work” into “art work” through performing domestic labour in a fine art context such as on the steps of a museum.

Wood Pile specifically considers repetitious and ritualized art practices through the allegory embedded in the work to question the “interwoven relationships of viewer/art object and process/result”. Finally, with "Wood Pile", there is the further suggestion that art practice approached in this fashion can lead to enlightenment, and that after enlightenment, there is still much more artwork to be made.

Sasha is a young conceptual artist who’s work draws from literature, art history, religion, philosophy, pop, Japanese and Canadian culture. Canadian-born to one Japanese and one Canadian parent, the conflation of culture plays a natural role in Sascha’s work. A year 2000 visual arts graduate of Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Sascha has shown his work in galleries across British Columbia and Washington State including: the Museum of Northern BC, Helen Pitt Gallery, Kamloops Art Gallery, Viking Union Gallery and the Back Gallery Project. In 2008 Sasha co-founded Vancouver’s Gallery Atsui and is currently an acting director. For more information go to: http://www.galleryatsui.com/.

BUY "WOOD PILE" NOW STARTING AT $45+