A Guide to Sakurako Reed’s Body of Work
The end of August marked the end of our time with Sakurako Reed as our resident artist. Sakurako was the first artist to have a three month stay in the Mezzanine studio: a new normal for feverdream resident artists from now on. With all that extra time working together I was able to learn more about her artistic practice and work so here I’m providing a more critical guide to understanding her work.
Each work in the carousel is ordered chronologically in the order that she painted it in. Because of our Lab Rat show we finally have titles for all our resident’s work! This also means both our previous residents’ works have titles and have been updated accordingly in their respective guides.
Sakurako started the residency by doing a version of Edward Hopper’s Gas from 1940 replacing the central and only figure with a flat 2D illustration of a fish with arms and legs. She titles hers Still Gas. This fish figure is essential to Sakurako’s residency. Her proposal was to focus on contextualizing her fish works within the scope of painting and drawing, rather than within the scope of installations and print like she has done in her MFA work. Thematically, her focus was to use absurdity and humor to examine in-betweenness. Said best by the artist herself:
“Something is something, but something also isn’t something. Humans like to categorize things, and it can certainly help keep things organized and functional. But what about all of the things, all of the people, who can’t cleanly be organized? What about those that exist within a space of in-between—a space of being this and that, and that and this? Having a Japanese mother and an American father, in-between-ness is something that I will never be able to escape, and will appear in my work whether I like it or not.”
This first piece definitely utilizes this tactic by token of its immediate absurdity clashing with a painstakingly detailed replication of another artist's work emblazoned with a goofy looking fish out of place (in style and place) seemingly pumping gas without a car. Still Gas does a little more than just that— it was brought up in critiques that this work made us examine absurdity in everyday life. We could see ourselves in the fish.
She followed up the Hopper remake with a deconstruction of the fish, using the eyes as polka dots in Yayoi Kusama’s Dots Infinity. Whereas the previous painting requires some specific knowledge of Hopper’s oeuvre, this piece chooses to sample a more widely recognized artist with a very strong personal style—arguably without knowing the specific work, a viewer could still arrive at Kusama generally. This piece humorously titled Dots Finity relies on that recognition of the iconic aesthetic of Kusama and uses it to its own advantage. Sakurako seems to be forcing the viewer to look at her fish character more closely to be able to see any other patterns that may appear in the gallery. This work is like a rorschach—the viewer asks if they see this fish hidden in all her works. Dots Finity works great in concert with the other works as a more passive piece.
The Feather 2023 Upgrade swings the pendulum right back to being more active. In Sakurako’s third piece she replaces the figure’s head in Alphonse Mucha’s The Feather. In her proposal, Sakurako references Albert Camus—one of the three ways to cope with The Absurd is to embrace it. “And truly, I feel there’s no better way to do so than absurd humor,” she wrote. The Feather 2023 Upgrade is very absurd, even more so than Still Gas. She spent a number of weeks of her residency recreating every part of this intricate art nouveau work. The process as much as the product is absurd, which elevates the work. It is hard to talk about because of that previously mentioned in-betweenness— we cannot categorize this work. As like the others it is both reverent to the source material while also being blatantly not.
In her final critique Sakurako said that she is interested in quick recognition and familiarity when deciding what piece to riff off of. What better artist to choose than Takashi Murakami— an artist who's been devoted to the poppy style for years. Flowers, 2002 gets updated to F(ish)lowers 2. Like the Kusama piece, where Sakurako used the eyes as polka dots, here she uses the bodies of her fish as petals. F(ish)lowers 2 is passive again and lets the personal style shine.
August 21 but now it’s 2023 references how on August 21, 1911 a former Louvre employee Vincenzo Perugia stole the Mona Lisa. But in her version of the heist, Sakurako includes her stuffed fish from her MFA as the thieves stealing the Mona Lisa with a fish imposed on the head of the painting’s namesake. During her MFA she made installations with these fish sculptures that were stolen multiple times and she plays off of this fact here. She doesn’t just contextualize her fish through the painting of the most parodied piece of art of all time, but also in installation. Sakurako reveals her intentions most clearly in this work. She fully embraces multiple levels of absurdity here.
Sakurako’s Proposal Sketch
