SACHIGUSA YASUDA: FLYING
The bird’s eye view is the most democratic and fulfilling of the perspectival views. There are no loose ends, each avenue climaxes with a definite conclusion—complete, ordered, and unambiguous. If our lives could have such certainty, if all horizons could be understood and encompassed, would we ever yearn for the fall, that weightless, careless, moment of drunken vertigo?

Flying alludes to the recent epidemic of suicide cyber cults in Sachigusa Yasuda’s native Japan—internet chat groups where suicide pacts are hatched and meticulously planned by young adults ironically trying to find meaning in their lives by ending them—a rate of one suicide every 15 minutes. Viewers must put themselves in the position of the ‘leaper’ and conjure the moment when the end is inevitable. Will they, like surviving Golden gate ‘jumpers’ immediately regret their loss of purchase?

Flying comprises a series of large-scale photographs exploring the visual and psychological effects of exaggerated and forced perspectives on familiar landmarks, in this case, Manhattan architecture. Arguably, the most reproduced and mythologized subject on earth, the Manhattan in Yasuda’s photographs is pictured as a dark metropolis, vertiginous and magnificent. It is the Gotham of comics, the canyons where superheroes swing, climb, and fly; where glowing rivers of taxis rush below and the city—fairytale New York—climbs toward heaven like a beanstalk but Yasuda’s gaze is fixed firmly down below.

The three point perspective views and impossible angles and vistas—formed by collaging hundreds of images shot from slightly different viewpoints into seamless photographs—presents a series of dizzying and chilling scenes. The artist’s presence—she leans from top storey windows to take the shots—is erased during the digital process creating the illusion of filming while falling, a moment of weightlessness, of brief doomed equipoise. With her eyes directed so far below the horizon, the artist and in turn viewer, can only regard heaven as a fading memory. As in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and other early German Expressionist works, the forced perspective in Yasuda’s photographs ratchets anxiety and alienation upward towards discomfort and fear, shrouding the city with a sinister and menacing mantle.

Yasuda’s work evokes the graphic sensibility of Paul Strand’s photographs of New York; the dynamic angularity of Lewis Hine’s portraits of the Empire State Building; and the jazzy cubism of a Stuart Davis painting. One cannot help but recall The Third Man (1949) with Orson Welles as Harry Lime looking down from the great Ferris wheel at the people scurrying below: "Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?" Yasuda's photographs agree but with the added clarification that from below, we too, appear as dots.

Born in Tokyo, in 1968, Sacigusa Yasuda received her B.A. in 1993, and her M.F.A. in 1995, from Tokyo University of Fine Art and Music. She has exhibited in a number of group exhibitions including Art Watching part 2, The Miyagi Museum of Art, Miyagi, Japan (2003); Shinkusas Multiple, Gallery TEZZ, Tokyo, Japan; Healing the Environment, Pittsburg Center for the Arts, Pennsylvania (2002); and Vertigo Room, IT Park Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan (2002). Yasuda’s solo exhibitions include Flying, Kuspace, Vienna, Austria (2004); Gravity, SAP Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2001); and Room, Gallery Room, Paris, France (2000). In 2004 she received an award from the Japanese government financing a two-year artist residency in United States. Sacigusa Yosuda currently lives and works in New York City.

Ciara Ennis
Curator of Exhibition, UCR/CMP