Exaggerated, morphed, suspended, and slumped, the work of Amia Yokoyama (b. Illinois; lives and works in Los Angeles) at once challenges and reimagines the boundaries of our world. Whether working in holograms, animation, or clay, she explores the metamorphosis of materials, using their endlessly evolving qualities to speak to the porous, leaky, decaying, and actively becoming process of what it means to be alive. In dialogue with the elemental forces of nature, including earth, fire, water, and air, her works engage both geological and mythological bodies to speak to the alchemical transformation and transmutation of all things over time. From dust we came and to dust we will return.

Within Our Strange Hollows, glass forms float across delicate curves of molded clay glazed in tinctures of pumice and obsidian that have been melted onto the ceramic surface like lava or sludge. We also find tools of measurement and orientation, such as bronze towers with antenna-like spires, suspended plumb bobs, and balancing spirit levels, each pointing to the infinite cycles of oscillation, interference, and entanglement that act upon us at a particle level, like invisible transmissions. This is a world in which a mountain is also a well; a cave is a cliff; a liquid is a solid; and desire is destruction. Here, every surface is a mirage, every frame a veil. Like magic and myths, Yokoyama’s layered sculptures embrace the power of illusion to bring us into a space of temporary suspension—of forms, of time, and of meaning. Together, her works point to the unseen forces (psychological, material, spiritual, or subatomical) that shape our universe of relation—pulling at us, forming us, and sculpting our lived realities.

Moving across the material and immaterial, the seen and unseen, Yokoyama’s works frustrate and expand our relationship to temporality and form. Like the artist’s featured holograms, in which every fragment contains the entire whole, her work invites us into a web of interconnections at both earthly and spiritual realms. As above, so below.