Exhibitions
Keiko Yamamoto
GHOST
23rd August - 27th Sept 2007
This installation creates a world of beautiful suspension, of passing shadows and departure moments. A calming and comfortable loss.
Keiko Yamamoto is a captivating and accomplished photographer. The exhibition introduces Yamamoto’s viewpoint dealing with the ambiguity of human nature through observing everyday life in both Japan and the UK. Her main approach is to stare into the background of the mundane and bring it back to a life of its own. These images generate discussion on cultural differences and the common values between the East and the West; rural and urban; real and imaginary perspectives
Ben Platts-Mills writes:
Industrial arctic sunset, the texture of a ploughed field. Spark white fissures in a window, hardened by the flash. Bed linen folded and mashed like pale clay, chalk blue shadows. They can only be photographs, these images. They depict things that can't be seen with the naked eye, that can only occur through the camera. They aren't visions, or thoughts – they are prints: mechanical, chemical, the taking of light and shade. And yet they aren't documents. They record nothing real, they have no time or place. The pictures don't refer to people. Even when figures appear, they become part of the weave, the disconnected moment. The objects in the pictures are without clear boundaries, can't be told apart, exchange meanings with one another, are no longer objects.
Walking towards Kingsland Road from Keiko's house; a group of friends on a day in late spring; the sky is pale and the streets are littered with refuse, thronged and slippery. Singing is audible from the Redeemed Christian Church of God, a glass fronted building to our left. I am walking behind Keiko and her husband, Hamish. As we approach the junction, I hear Keiko exclaim: 'Hamish! You stepped on a rat!' Turning as we walk, the rest of us try to find the offending rodent, but cannot make it out from the rubbish surrounding the lamppost. 'Or a burger,' says Keiko.
Another occasion, in winter, after a dinner at a friend's house not far away. In the cobbled alley outside, the rain reflects the yellow streetlights. In the darkness I see a mound of something white on the ground. Pointing, I ask Keiko: 'What's that?' 'A rabbit,' Keiko responds without hesitating. As we pass by I note the hunched shape of the sodden toilet roll.
An evening in summer, a patio in Kilburn. 'The earth began as a snow-ball,' explains Keiko. 'Slugs are descended from mammals.'
In 1999 Keiko Yamamoto took photographs of the inside of her family home in Tokyo and then mounted them on the railings outside the house. Pictures of her family at private moments, tabletops cluttered with dinner remains, cigarette butts, naked knees, sleeping faces - images of the living space exposed. The home turned inside out like a rubber glove.
Her photography is a history of the organism, a catalogue of the alien everyday. And they are a trick – to the eye that wants something from the photograph they are a tease. Was I there? Did I see this? Is that me? …Is that my shadow? The images are restorations of things that never happened, places that don't exist, artefacts that have resurfaced from limbo, from the back of the sofa, arriving now stripped of their story. Like the phenomena they depict, they seem to be without author, seem to collect over time, as though by accident, or by themselves. They give the impression of being unrepeatable like Polaroid's, coming into being whole, without process. She catches – I suppose – the world unawares with a casual hipshot. I picture her standing for a long time, in silence, until a room has forgotten her presence. They are happenings from the interior, these ghosts, where light and thought are trapped for a moment and form their own unrepeatable grammar. The intangible, the unmakeable, the disappeared. Ben Platts-Mills |
