WINDOWS 2002 PEACE

Artist: Jerry Kamitaki

This Autumn, Sagacho Archives is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Japanese American artist Jerry Kamitaki, one of Sagacho Exhibit Space's early artists.
Kamitaki gained a lot of attention at his solo exhibition in Sagacho Exhibit Space in 1984 with his two-dimensional works that fully pursued minimalism, creating a strong impact on his younger generation of artists. In fact, exhibitions by other artists at Sagacho including Satoshi Hata and Toshiya Kobayashi came in response to Jerry Kamitaki's art which altogether brought a minimalist influence to that period of time.

In this exhibition, Kamitaki will be presenting his new works in Japan for the first time in 30 years. He describes these adventurous two-dimensional works as "drawings", created by altering pages from Artforum, a contemporary art magazine from New York, which is recognized for its influence in the world's art trends.

Kamitaki started making these two-dimensional readymades with editorial pages using his wellspring of concepts and his own hands, manipulating the pages into unpredictable surfaces. This group of artwork can be contextualized to Kamitaki's artistic production so far, as he has used graphite in the past to create a variety of different multi-layered surfaces.

While Kamitaki mentioned how the serialization of the magazines suits his interest, this series of work, on the other hand, suggests how the featured and reproduced artworks in the art magazines tend to be recognized as the only art that exists nowadays.

About the exhibition title "WINDOWS 2002 PEACE"

Kamitaki states that "Windows" are open to good opportunities as well as the bad and unknown. Also for "Peace" - many metaphors and codes are hidden in Kamitaki's work. In fact, Kamitaki himself was born in "Manzanar War Relocation Center" - a concentration camp in Arizona where Japanese Americans were being incarcerated under the Executive Order 9066 during World War II. Looking at how the current president of the United States is dealing with immigrants from Central and South America, we can perceive how Kamitaki has a great longing for peace.