almost something insider forum

installation view

Each person has a different feeling of the length of one hour.
A synchronous event can cross space and connect distant people to the same time.

I place a wristwatch with an alarm clock in the exhibition space.
Same as the wristwatch I am always wearing. I wear the same watch to the exhibition. The watches both indicate Japan standard time.

The alarm delimits the time that I am using in Japan and the time of the exhibition in NY at the same time.

I yawned in the train on the evening of a certain day.
Then, the girl who had been sitting on my front saw my yawn, and she yawned.
Then, the old man who was sitting right side of me saw her yawn, and he yawned.
We felt something each other right now.
The yawn infects from me to you.
It is unconscious at all.
I spotlight this unconscious communications.
It is an aim of this work to notice these unconscious communications.

Daisuke Yamashiro’s work involves seeking out unexpected methods of communication. Yawn and see if anyone around you will yawn, for instance. Will someone nearby unconsciously reply? This piece tries to raise your sense of awareness without directing your attention to any particular object. Your participation in the work is more essential than your acknowledgment of it. Jayeon Kwon’s Sleeping Dolls are made with a similar underlying investment in the idea of being alert. The photographs depict staged compositions, but it is the artist’s daughters and not the artist who has composed them. The sleeping dolls are messages, essentially, that the two girls leave behind for their mother to discover and to interpret.

Daisuke presents a direct link to semi-essentialism in that he studied with Makari Kamatso at the Tokyo Art Institute. He became interested in the potential thing-like nature of feelings and sensations. They happen, they're real. But then again, they are only an effect. If nothing else, they need a body to happen. They’re secondary characteristics, as the philosophers might say. And still, when a body yawns it's as if, for those few seconds, there's nothing else. Daisuke, in a nod to Kamatso and semi-essentialism, calls yawns 'primary accidents'.

installation view

installation view