NEW CANAAN, CT.- Heather Gaudio Fine Art recently opened 'Mio Yamato: 呼吸する星 / The Breathing Star', marking the Japanese artist’s first solo gallery exhibition in the United States. The show, which features newly created works along with a site-specific installation, opened March 18th, and will continue through April 29, 2023.
Mio Yamato has gained international attention in recent year for her signature marks -- copious amounts of tiny, pearl-like dots painted with oil or ink on canvases, wooden panels, walls, or large swaths of fabric. These are finely applied and arranged to articulate formations seen in nature, such as mountainous ranges, geological strata, constellations in the sky, and the like. As a child, Yamato spent hours in her grandfather’s orchid greenhouse, observing and keeping notations and sketches of the plants as they grew and blossomed. She learned to understand how blooms thrive in ideal environmental conditions and the way other organisms, such as moss, can symbiotically flourish as well. From these experiences came the idea of the dot. Her first Red Dot as she dubs it. With this singular mark, Yamato developed notions behind ever-changing continuums. For the artist, there can be no independent existence, everything in the universe is connected. We are all stardust, sourced from other stars, supernovas that exploded into fragments that went into other stellar structures and eventually into all living things.
In Yamato’s works, the ubiquitous dots of paint or ink are deposited ever so delicately on the surface, making for quietly expressive compositions. The dotted arrangements render movement, gradation, and sense of depths, mutating to create allusions to the natural world that extend beyond the picture plane. However delicately applied the dots are, there is a physicality to the work. The artist allows the paintings to “grow” on its own: “I work while observing how the work grows autonomously,” she states. Yamato will shift the course of the lines diagonally or vertically to create new undulations. Other works by the artist extend the dotted marks into thin, fine lines, which are also slowly applied. Serpentine in character, these too are accumulated to make forms reminiscent of blocks of rocks, cross sections of mountains with three dimensional shadows. Although these visual cues are landscape in nature, there is no horizon line, nothing that fully grounds the viewer to formulate the scale of the imagery presented. There is no traditional perspective in field painting, these landscapes can be seen aerially or from the ground. In so doing, Yamato emphasizes that everywhere in space cannot be assimilated from the single focus perspective.
For this exhibition, the artist will present new paintings on panel and canvas, as well as thin veils of scrim. Additionally, she will reprise a site-specific installation, this time moving beyond the gallery walls to a large pane of glass that is the outside window of the gallery.
Yamato has been actively exhibiting in Japan and overseas since earning her M.A. in 2015. She is known for creating monumental scale site specific installations, such as Red Dot (Bio), 2020, at the Hotel Anteroom Naha in Okinawa and Blazing in the Sea of Love, 2021 in the Visionarium Three Shibuya, Tokyo, and Under My Skin, at the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum. Yamato has been the recipient of numerous awards including from the Art Award Tokyo Marunouchi; the Kyoto University of Art and Design; the Contemporary Art Foundation, and most recently the Fundación Casa Wabi in Oaxaca, Mexico. The artist currently lives and works in Kyoto.
This exhibition is made possible through the generous collaboration with COHJU Contemporary in Kyoto, Japan
