Tokyo, Japan – WAITINGROOM is pleased to announce a group exhibition “Shape of Gaze” through February 15th to March 8th 2020, showcasing the works by Akiko Kinugawa, Yuma Tomiyasu and Suzuka Toyoda. The “gaze” of each of the three female painters will unfold in the gallery space like an installation. The people, things, and phenomena they depict which appear in the painting in a slightly different way than usual, are full of mystery, as if they are dotted with images of human activities, events in the natural world, and various fragments surrounding people. The viewer will feel the presence of something floating and coexisting in the world these female artists are looking at.
Akiko Kinugawa is an artist who keeps depicting the moment when you realize the existence of mutual consciousness, the moment when you confront a person or animal and your eyes meet. The paint is rubbed thinly onto the canvas or cotton cloth, creating a fuzzy body, but sometimes giving off a raw, visceral appearance. At her solo exhibition held at switch point in Kokubunji in December 2019, she presented a new series that overturned her previous impressions and gave a fresh surprise. As she stated that “All matter and consciousness appear to be separate and have their own form and meaning, but in fact they are only separated by concepts, and when the concepts are removed, they are fluid bodies that mix and separate at will, like a slime mold”, in this exhibition, she will again show a new series of works created “with the aim of harmonizing two things or parts within a painting.”
Yuma Tomiyasu’s work focuses on capturing the boundary between reality and fiction in everyday life. Taking cues from our perception of the invisible, such as the deep psychology of human beings and psychic spirits, which cannot necessarily be clarified by science, she has been working on oil paintings using images of ectoplasm and orbs that appear in psychic photographs, sleepwalking, faceless portraits, and deformed people as her motifs. As a motivation for creating these works, “I would like to pick up such ‘uncertain things’ in my work, which are often overlooked in modern society. Because I believe that the act of noticing and paying attention to such uncertain and ambiguous things is an important opportunity to rethink the world and oneself,” she says.
Suzuka Toyoda depicts people and the situations surrounding them that she witnesses in a moment of everyday life. She paints her own memories on canvas, based on the images she happens to see on the Internet and photographs, to ensure that she captures something strange that only she can see. This will be the first exhibition at a commercial gallery for Toyoda, who is still a graduate student at Tokyo University of the Arts.
