Amia Yokoyama: Our Strange Hollows

At once fantastical, monstrous, and rooted in the everyday, the work of **Amia Yokoyama** (b. in Illinois; lives and works in Los Angeles) brings together the mediums of ceramic sculpture, experimental animation, holography, painting, and installation, to create and challenge the mythologies and boundaries of our world. Whether working in holograms or clay, she's interested in the metamorphosis of materials, using their shifting qualities and charged histories to speak to the porous, leaky, decaying, and actively becoming process of what it means to be alive; a recurring series of breakdowns and repairs. As she has noted, "With ceramics, I usher the clay and minerals through multiple stages of metamorphosis. It requires a dialog with earth, fire, water, and air. It's chemistry. But it also provides an access point to political histories, ancient cultural rituals and signification, bodily relations, poetry, geological processes, and physical materiality that are all important to my world/my work.…I am exploring what happens when something exists in multiple dimensions at the same time. What is lost and what is gained through this push and pull? What is discovered within the essence of a thing when it goes through this transformation, and what is created as a byproduct of the process?" Hidden in veils of glass, emerging from towers of bronze, and mining cultural mythologies of the underworld, Yokoyama's work moves across the material and immaterial, the seen and the unseen, to frustrate and expand our relationship to temporality and form in literal and metaphysical ways. Like a hologram, wherein every fragment contains the entire whole, her work invites us into a web of interconnections at both earthly and spiritual realms. As above, so below. Featuring a constellation of new works, this fall's ICA LA Project Room exhibition will be Yokoyama's first institutional solo presentation.