Hedges and Ledgers

Hedges and Ledgers features a group of photo-based sculptures, textile installation, a hanging cast sculpture, and aluminum-mounted photographs. Taken together, these objects collectively examine personal and political notions of place, the diaspora and assimilation culture.

In a series of printed paper constructions, curving, twisting, and sewn-together architectural images serve as psychogeographic maps. Over months and years, Yoshitsu has moved through urban spaces, attentively observing and documenting the built environment as she traversed it. The artist sought a variety of perspectives — walking, driving, from a train, from the roof — approaching each infrastructural element from different directions, and noting changes over time.

Yoshitsu uses the resulting photographic prints as working material. The infrastructural elements are hand-trimmed, then sewn together by machine and by hand into intricate free-standing sculptures. The resulting objects are often then relocated into new settings and again photographed, the construction acting as a miniature iteration of its new context. In other photos, the paper constructions are scaled up digitally in relation to their surroundings, a wry take on the value placed on monumentality. The sculptural pieces, when dismantled, are then remixed and repurposed into larger hanging dimensional structures.

Yoshitsu’s disrupted architecture recalls Gordon Matta-Clark, while the twisted industrial forms evoke John Chamberlain and Nancy Rubens. The artist has also cited Rene Magritte's The Castle of the Pyrenees and Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International in relation to the hanging and free-standing constructions.

A textile-based installation in the front gallery, Return and Schedule Self-Interest, is comprised of a series of hanging embroidered textile panels. The pattern of the stitching reproduces the lines from an income tax form 1040, here enlarged to scale of the human body. Viewers can physically walk between the sheets, sandwiched within them. As the artist says, “Through textiles and scale, the work speaks to the emotional, and often traumatic impact, that this notoriously boring and onerous, yet potent and ever-present, apparatus has on us individually and collectively.”  Evoking the work of Mona Hatoum and Agnes Martin, the piece can also be related to Peter Halley’s cells and conduits, in which the control of bodies by architecture and systems — both physical and metaphorical — is made manifest.

Genius/Genus Bar is a smaller wall-hung sculpture in which text takes physical form. Materially potent, the word “GEN/US” is cast in skin-lightening soap, embodying and conjoining the concepts of capitalism and racism in relation to cultural ideas of cleanliness.

Press release courtesy of Satchel Projects.

Some images courtesy of Satchel Projects and AmaYah Harrison.