ruler 定規

Since her 1990 solo exhibition, TOYOSHIMA Yasuko (1967-) has looked at social rules, values, and formalized behavior in our institutions and interactions with others, and created works that give visualization to the systems we unconsciously internalize and, particularly, her own involvement with them. Her methods, which are an extension or radicalization of our everyday actions, can be called “interventions” in the objects and systems we actually use. Ruler is a work representative of her early period when she intervened in the meaning and function of everyday articles. Here, she has applied heat to a ruler (i.e. a “common standard”) with result that the scale has warped and lost its utility. The warped ruler can only serve to accentuate the immeasurable uniqueness of each material it seeks to measure. Transfer to my Account, which gives visualization to the act of continually transferring money to her own account from an ATM, is part of a series with Open Bank Account, which concerns opening a bank account as a “personal space.” By performing to excess the procedure of incorporating herself in a system, that of a bank in this case, she sought to show her own circumstances in the society of the 1990s, when encoding was rapidly underway. Toyoshima’s work consistently makes the inquiry, “What shapes me?” in a contemporary society where forms of systemization and administration proliferate. The works differ in appearance, but the method, common to all, of trying to incorporate herself in the system and grasp it, we can view as encouraging us to think independently about our individual will and freedom.