Daisuke Yokota – Site/Cloud
16 May - 6 July 2014

Selected artist Outset | Unseen Exhibition Fund 2013

Daisuke Yokota is part of a leading young generation of Japanese photographers. This exhibition presents work from his Site/Cloud series . His images in predominantly black and white - sometimes with a subtle hint of colour - show a haunting, indefinable world with shadowy, anonymous apparitions and nondescript places, contrasted with sublime, colourful representations of skies and clouds which evoke feelings of timelessness.

With his strongly contrasted black-and-white photography, Yokota seems to, at first glance, be working in the Japanese photography tradition. However a close examination of his work reveals an individual approach in which the elements of process and intervention play an important role. He uses a combination of digital photography and traditional film to shoot and re-shoot images, which he then manipulates further using other techniques such as photocopying and Photoshop. He has set up an improvised darkroom in his apartment where he can freely experiment with analogue techniques and chemical processes, where chance is also allowed to leave its traces on the final image. Yokota adds layer upon layer to his work, with each layer offering new potential for the next image, leading to alienated, mysterious and poetic representations of a different sort of world.

The works - whose endless repetitions take them further and further away from the original image - are partly inspired by electronic musicians such as Aphex Twin. He takes the same ideas of echo, delay and reverberation that influence the sense of time in their music and applies them to his own visual work. Yokota feels that the lack of a sense of duration and perception of time is a weak point in photography, so he experiments with other ways of evoking the aspect of time in his work. For example by creating images that refer to memories, dreams, or mindscapes that enable the viewer to make a mental journey through time.

This exhibition has been organised as part of the The Outset|Unseen Exhibition Fund. The Outset|Unseen Exhibition Fund is a unique partnership between Unseen Photo Fair and Outset Netherlands, providing a new institutional platform for emerging talent. Scouting the fair before opening hours, each year the selection committee selects one artist exhibiting at Unseen for a solo exhibition at Foam.