At once fantastical, monstrous, and rooted in the everyday, the work of Amia Yokoyama (b. in Illinois; lives and works in Los Angeles) brings together the mediums of ceramic sculpture, experimental animation, holography, painting, and installation, to create and challenge the mythologies and boundaries of our world. Whether working in holograms or clay, she’s interested in the metamorphosis of materials, using their shifting qualities and charged histories to speak to the porous, leaky, decaying, and actively becoming process of what it means to be alive; a recurring series of breakdowns and repairs. As she has noted, “With ceramics, I usher the clay and minerals through multiple stages of metamorphosis. It requires a dialog with earth, fire, water, and air. It’s chemistry. But it also provides an access point to political histories, ancient cultural rituals and signification, bodily relations, poetry, geological processes, and physical materiality that are all important to my world/my work.…I am exploring what happens when something exists in multiple dimensions at the same time. What is lost and what is gained through this push and pull? What is discovered within the essence of a thing when it goes through this transformation, and what is created as a byproduct of the process?”
Hidden in veils of glass, emerging from towers of bronze, and mining cultural mythologies of the underworld, Yokoyama’s work moves across the material and immaterial, the seen and the unseen, to frustrate and expand our relationship to temporality and form in literal and metaphysical ways. Like a hologram, wherein 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.
Featuring a constellation of new works, this fall’s ICA LA Project Room exhibition will be Yokoyama’s first institutional solo presentation.
Amia Yokoyama is a multimedia Los Angeles-based artist whose process explores the negotiations between metamorphosis, hybridity, the collisions of the virtual and physical selves, and inevitable moments of transformation and breakdown. She received her MFA in Experimental Animation from CalArts and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2017. Amia has exhibited her work at the Armory Center for the Arts, Sebastian Gladstone Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA); The Craft Contemporary Museum (Los Angeles, CA); In Lieu Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); The Japanese American Cultural Center (Los Angeles, CA); The Brand Art Center (Los Angeles, CA); Deli Gallery (Mexico City, MX); The Drawing Center (New York, NY); Anthology Film Archive (New York, NY); and more.