Aki Sasamoto
Yield Point
2017
Digital video
21’44’’
How elastic are you?
When I am stretched, my body fails first. Perhaps my thought process fails beforehand but I am dysfunctional to register that. Crazy life events in a row would make me collapse, only to realize I had already started to collapse some time before the event of the shut down. Backtracking to uncover an exact tipping point, I collect multiple hypothetical scenarios, often with exaggerated tragic glimpses. This is how a single collapse generates many wounds.
I have empathetic bond with the droopy elastic band of a worn underwear. Sometimes I feel just like it. I wish to learn from the broken and elongate the healthy life of the material the next time. I swear to each object I greet (a new underwear, a new notebook, a new partner, etc). But the chicken race to approach a threshold multiplies my wounds anyhow. i am now an expert in the stretch.
Measuring is the first thing to be learned in a Physics lab. Every event produces a graph or multiple graphs. I love the task of making graphs with manually measured displacements. My graphs are never perfect but I enjoy bending eyes with anticipation for an expected result. You know, cheating happens past the yield point before the break.
(excerpt from the press release at The Kitchen)
About Aki Sasamoto：
Aki Sasamoto is a New York-based, Japanese artist, who works in performance, sculpture, dance, and whatever more medium that takes to get her ideas across. Her works have been shown both in performing art and visual art venues in New York and abroad. Besides her own works, she has collaborated with musicians, choreographers, scientists and scholars, and she plays multiple roles of dancer, sculptor, or director.
Sasamoto’s performance/installation works revolve around gestures on nothing and everything. Her installations are careful arrangements of sculpturally altered found objects, and the decisive gestures in her improvisational performances create feedback, responding to sound, objects, and moving bodies. The constructed stories seem personal at first, yet oddly open to variant degrees of access, relation, and reflection.