Masao Yamamoto at Yancey Richardson - New York - Brief Article

Masao Yamamoto uses the Buddhist term "Nakazora" for the title of this series of photographs. The word means, among other things, "empty air," "hollow," "a state when feet do not touch the ground" and "the inability to decide between two things."

Applied to these assemblages of small, often blurry, unframed photographs covering the wall in loosely placed groupings, nakazora might refer either to the images themselves or to the way they are installed. Some are found images and some have been created by the artist. Each one offers a fleeting glimpse of landscape or interior. Figures, when they appear, tend to be located in the distance. Most of the photographs are black and white, although there are a few with flashes of color.

It is clear that the spaces between the images are as important as the images themselves. Sprinkled on the wall with a definite rhythm, they are intended, as the gallery release states, to serve as visual haikus. The various-sized photographs bring us in and out of focus, oscillating between deep and close perspective, and force us to linger on the white spaces of the wall to which they are rather tenuously attached with linen tape to foam core. This arrangement encourages a shifting perception where the eye does not rest any one place for very long.

Some images have more memorable content than others. In one photo, flower pots have been arranged in a grid formation on stained cement. Another presents a red flower in the snow. Yet another focuses on swans in formation on a lake. Compositional complexity seems largely beside the point. Many of the images convey an emptiness--there are numerous photographs of floating clouds, empty horizons and the almost uniform surface of slightly rippling water. There is a deliberately timeless quality to many of the images, which make only passing reference to urban life or modern times. Some are sepiatoned with ragged edges and make an appeal to nostalgia.

Yamamoto also provided a box with yet more photographs that visitors could flip through, and perhaps construct their own sequences. The effect, though a bit precious, was to encourage viewers to savor these transitory impressions of the surrounding world.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group