September 14 – October 20, 2024
Gallery Route One’s Visiting Artist Program presents Terrain in Vain by Amy Yoshitsu, a photography-based installation of sculptures, collage and imagery that explore how physical contexts and systemic forces undergird our shared and intimate realities.
The concepts, imagery, and materials of Yoshitsu’s work are informed by infrastructure, which encompasses the act of supporting, the undergirding for creation, and the workforce maintaining our unsustainable global practices. The objects embody the reality that systemic forces are driven by economic and social incentives in power structures that perniciously guide our decisions and interpretations. Sewing and textiles are employed by the artist to interweave the effects of entrenched systems on the body, the delicate, the intimate.
Yoshitsu’s photo-based sculptures are made of photographs the artist has taken in places she has lived and visited. As an Asian-American human, Yoshitsu identifies as being of the diaspora and a product of assimilation culture, and believes that what we see around us—the landscape and buildings, the types of labor and activities, the aesthetic and technological choices and conditions—plays a role in who we are while our lineages inform how we make sense of it all.
The artist explains, “I have lived my life walking and weaving within urban spaces of the US while psychologically contending with generational traumas, motherlands (China and Japan) as simultaneously foreign and integrated, and my own position within histories of speculation, hierarchical race creation and colonialism. By photographing and sewing together places from all over the world that I have occupied or inhabited, I create sculptures honoring the manifestations of histories, shared needs, connected conditions.” The resulting sculptures are psychogeographic maps that miniaturize and deconstruct structured space—a product of human labor, the authority of financialization, and modern survival.
