KAYOKOYUKI

SLASH is a series of two-person exhibitions each as a collaborative project rather than mere juxtaposition of works by the two artists featured. Each exhibition begins with consecutive meetings to develop mutual understandings, learning each other’s vision and awareness. Discussing what kind of proposition to make toward society with their work, and going through all the possibilities, they would little by little build up their plan for the exhibition.
Even the invitation card is designed as a collaborative artwork. In relation to the artist's common interests, several key words are picked up and transformed into an abstract concept to which the art director CRAFTIVE would elaborately gives form with reasonable materials and methodologies.
I believe it is quite important to exchange ideas with others and take the initiative to create new values together, not following given directions set by certain powerful artists or curators, nor leaving it up to the trend of the times. Rather than trusting individual self-absorbed thinking, nor being worried about winning or losing, we just have to believe in the prolific imagination arising at the intersection of different ideas.

*SLASH derives from a type of fan fiction with the same name that focuses on a paring of two characters. The name arises from the use of the slash symbol (/) to separate the two names in those stories, instead of using of the ampersand (&) conventionally.

Yutaka Nozawa photographs and films sceneries, objects, and phenomena that somehow stimulate or inspire him on his trips and in his everyday life. Using those photographs and films, as well as found objects, as tools to recompose the landscape, he creates a complex mixed-media installation. Tomotsugu Manabe's contribution to the exhibition marks a shift from the artist's early works that exposed sculptural skeletons, where he repetitively pushed clay toward the core of stones he had picked up on riversides or toward the given wall's other side, to a body of work using more of everyday materials: a series of sculptures in the form of Japanese ancient pottery (Jomon ware) made of interwoven advertisement flyers, as well as one made of house dusts in the form of the oldest Japanese clay doll.
Advocated by Carl Jung, Synchronicity is the experience of non-causal relations between different events, perceived through interactions between one's unconsciousness and outer things, unlike ordinary, causal relations between events. In relation to this concept, the title, "Keep Your Eyes Set on Faraway," indicates an eye to discover an analogy, meaning, or harmony between seemingly unrelated things that share no common context, for example between the original spirit of folk or craft art, which has been inherited in the form of techniques, and the origins of human artistic practices, such as the cave paintings, or between a vast desert in Morocco and a banal scenery seen from one's window.