For his exhibition GLASS at Kominek Gallery (Berlin), Yokota juxtaposes his sensitive studies of the nude body, his cold landscapes and his quixotic interior rooms with the condition of a new and precious materiality in which his photographic image is printed on glass. Light, emulsion (skin) and subject interweave a new paradigm in which the focus of Yokota’s lens is given a status of object over that of the normal photographic print. We may think of the works as prismatic and perhaps even dangerous should their form shift and crack or break. Surface is prevalent in many of Yokota’s works as is abstraction. In working with glass, Yokota is determined to make the surface of his work even more integral to his normal process creating a very special and jewel-like art form in which its precious state must be observed lest it be given over to its dangerous and cutting potential. Glass like skin is compressed by time, its condition precipice on the notion that its qualities are at all times exposed and present to the external world in which it must survive, flourish and proceed.
Brad Feuerhelm April, 2019
TORANSUPEARENTO (transparent) is VERTIGO’s hallucinatory sibling. Printed entirely on transparency film and edited by using sandwiches of several transparency pages alternated by white pages and colored vinyl pages. The publication is tracing Yokota’s creative process by showing the transformations of his images. Transitions from the original until a new image and expression. Abstraction and halluzination are enforced by visual distorsions when looking through several transparencies at one time.
Born in 1983, Saitama, Yokota majored in Photography at Nippon Photography Institute in Tokyo. As the winner of the first Outset | Unseen Exhibition Fund at Unseen Photo Fair 2013, he presented a solo exhibition at Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam, in 2014 with a series of his work that has been added to the museum collection. In the same year, his photography book VERTIGO was nominated for the Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. In 2015, he performed at “Shashin: Photography from Japan,” New York, and participating in “In the Wake Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11,” Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “Another Language,” Rencontres d’Arles as well as “trans-tokyo / trans-photo,” Jinmei x Arles International Photo Festival.