Interview

But then after I read these 2 books I began to create these conceptual artworks based on photographs I took inside this miniature gallery I built in my studio. I created this kind of a dollhouse , a small replica of a gallery in which I would put on these little group shows of things that I would find or make . And eventually I created these fictional artists who were supposedly responsible for making the works in the mini gallery. But I started to treat the idea of these artists as fictional characters in the same way that a writer does with characters for a novel . I started to create my own alternate art history using these characters – I called it Das Baue Auto. But in the end it really all became just too complicated for me and I ended up showing very few of the works .

Faculty from Das Blaue Auto 1998

model and subject ( After Picasso ) from Das Blaue Auto 1996 - 2008

So for the paintings in People I Know I really focused on working with tones and contrast – slowly building up these surfaces of oil paint to show these light color patterns that I saw in the tones of certain types of black and white photography from different periods in it’s history. And for the subjects I used portraits of people I know from my neighborhood of all ages . And tried to use images that were very simple, direct, and I photographed their faces in various poses that they naturally assumed in their daily lives – like looking down at their cell phone. And I framed or cropped the face tightly so they would be more flat, and the surface of the face would be as important as possible.

by Arata Sasaki for Hitspaper May 2009

I think maybe the unique presence of an individual or a thing, something you might feel or remember. With the current images I am making I have been trying to create the physical presence of light. Instead of recording light which is what I was doing with the photography I guess. I am trying to make the presence of light as physical as possible with a printed object.

I think though I have always just been very interested in images themselves: I am interested in how and why people react to images, psychologically speaking. And with Digital imaging today the change of what it is now possible to make is just so huge historically speaking. In terms of its effect on images – the change that digital has made is just mind numbing. We live in a new age for images : images have become totally plastic and elastic.

So I wanted to figure how to create new arrangements of contrast, and do it in kind of a new way. I started taking LCD screens apart, at first the little ones the older cheap cell phone ones and then older larger ones I got on Ebay. And began studying and photographing the matrix. I broke down the matrix and recombined them.

And I started to wonder, “What is the structure of light”, I mean how do we know light- - I wanted to treat it like it was a physical thing. I kept thinking in my head things like “what is the structure of overexposure” and how do we feel that blank space that the light has burned.

INTERVIEW

I have been an artist for a while often making things that nobody saw, but whatever else I was making I was always doing portraits of people. In the beginning though, after painting in a kind of abstract expressionist way for awhile in the shadow of artists like Willem de Kooning I read 2 books – “Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp” with Pierre Cabanne, and a biography of the artist Robert Irwin called “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” by Lawrence Weschler.

These 2 books changed everything for me and showed me really early on what I still think of as the 2 main things with art – what is the context , or “what is that thing!” with the Duchamp book which is more about our collective understanding of what we are looking at. And this other idea of pure presence from the Irwin book which is more about how someone just reacts to the visual or optical properties that they are looking at , kind of more “how does that stuff make me feel”.

Q. Could you tell us about your background please?

I learned allot from it though, and started to use Photoshop allot to help create many of those works. But really with the introduction of actual digital photography about 7 years ago I started to become more interested in photography itself, particularly street photography. I guess after all that work became too complicated , I just wanted to go outside and take a picture of someone right in front of my home. I wanted to make things that were more simple, a little less conceptual, and with a more direct connection to the viewer.

Could you tell us about your recent project "People I Know"? Are they paintings?

And how do you approach this work through technique?

These are oil paintings based on certain kinds of black and white photos. I began to really think allot about the use of contrast in images a couple of years ago and I became very interested in the history of black and white photography. When it came to thinking about the history of images I always came at it from a typical modern western history of painting - beginning with Cezanne leading to people like De Kooning, but then I began to realize that all of these great historical black and white photographers, people like Gustave LeGray to Erwin Blumenfeld to Robert Frank and how they worked with contrast and tones was maybe even more important than the cubist directions based on shapes with painters like Picasso or Mondrian who came after Cezanne. Basically that when it came to what really matters with images tonality is almost more important than forms or shapes.

Some of your other artworks like "Stop Down" and More Tums also represent a pretty fresh and unique vision.

How did you arrive at that point of view or philosophy?

I had started doing that street photography but somehow I really wanted to do something different with the process of how I took the picture, and I also wanted to frame the people, the subjects in the photos in a new way. So in the process of doing that I came up with a mechanism for creating pictures of people that I called situational photography.

But basically I tried to replace an arbitrary sphere of time when you might decide to take a picture with that of an actual situation taking place that would be responsible for when you take the picture – like the doors of an elevator closing. And I think often that when the viewer recognizes that this framework is in play they connect to the picture in a different way, they believe and buy into some kind of authenticity that the framework creates for them.

What are you trying to seek and express through your work?

As far as recent trends, what kinds of things do you see people looking from creators in particular, with art & photography?

That’s a good question; I think for me I am more and more interested in forming some kind of psychological basis of understanding art. I actually think that what a formal understanding of art should be more about is how easily we are tricked by pictures and things – science over magic. I think the only way to create a deeper magic is to expose the sources of the prevailing one. And I think digital allows us to really take images apart and figure out how they work on people.

But are people using digital in very different ways then they used photography.

Yes I think it really is a new medium as close to painting as it is to photography and printmaking, but likely larger than any because of the level of control and complexity it allows for. I think right now the act layering is the probably the most specific change or advance with making pictures digitally. Layering - not collage, I think really is the essence of a new medium or media as far as digital still images right now.

And what are you working on next ?

I am going to continue working with these ideas of contrast for a while I think . After I completed the photo series like More Turns and Stop Down. I really went back to the drawing board and I started from square one and just started looking at noise for a long time, positive and negative. I just looked at visual types of noise and began to focus on how the eye creates what it sees – how the eye views texture: how the eye decides if something is wet or dry. And in the process I started to think about an image differently, I started to think of it as pure abstract visual matter and the artist as someone who moves stuff around a rectangle with some understanding of how people might react to the way that stuff looks.

But this way of thinking is what led me back to the history of black and white photography. I mean when you look at an image by the photographer Weegee or Daido Moriyama it is not just the subject you are looking –which is often also amazing - but it is the tone or contrast - the pure power of contrast, and these artists are modulating the contrast in order to create specific human reactions.

image by Robert Frank Japanese wood block print

Robert ( detail ) oil on linen from the series People I Know

More Turns installation view

Down 6410 & Down 6411

Fire #8 2009 Pigment print on paper mounted to wood 30” X 40” Edition of 3 ( + 1AP ) from the series The Shape of Things Like The Sun

Self Portrait with Mirror #20 positive ( detail ) 2009 pigment print on canvas 18" X 23" edition of 3 (+1AP)