NYAB Event - Sayaka Maruyama and Esther Stocker “Lost in Another Space”

Sayaka Maruyama and Esther Stocker “Lost in Another Space”

+81 Gallery NY

This event has ended.

+81 gallery presents Lost in Another Space, a two-person exhibition featuring female artists Sayaka Maruyama and Esther Stocker.

The two artists fabricate fantastical space of dreamscapes and fictional truths, by distinctive and different means; Sayaka Maruyama by evocation of mood through color and texture, along with twisting and coalescing seemingly incompatible historical references. Esther Stocker by situating and manipulating otherwise intuitive and basic geometry into complicated and nuanced disorientation. In the exhibition, the two artists set up a space that is lost in another space.

Stocker, in her own words, “repairs” geometry that represents an actual truth, and a complete form, resulting in forms immediately recognizable and relatable, yet ultimately irreconcilable. The repaired geometry lacks what formerly made it a functioning mathematical reality and invites the viewer into the fantastical space of transforming lines. Interrupting the uniformity and predictable monotony of geometry and playful puzzlement takes place. Order and chaos are aesthetically woven into each other manifesting rhythmically distorted black and white contours that hover somewhere between a truth and a fiction, real and unreal.

The classically composed Sakura series by Maruyama draws on the notion of beauty. Incorporating national symbol of cherry blossoms (Sakura in Japanese), with images of a woman, Maruyama creates dreamy portraits in colors at once muted and intense. Deceivingly simple idea of beauty becomes both intricate and difficult as Maruyama intertwines different cultural notions of beauty into the individual images. Furthermore, Maruyama is interested in the exquisitely bleaker side of the aesthetic concepts, the violence and suffering that necessarily accompanies it, as in how corsets were used to shape a figure closer into an ideal shape yet never quite arriving there. The new pieces shown at the exhibition are printed on cloth, further adding organic texture and mood.

Maruyama’s is a land where cultural signifiers and notions of violence and beauty waltz, and distorts vision in a way that viewer might find clarity of what it is to be beautiful. Stocker’s installation with whimsical application on structural and macro level brings one into unpredictable joys of spontaneity and getting lost in a place, where simplest and most quotidian notions and shapes are questioned.