"Origins and Self-Creation" Artist Spotlight: Amia Yokoyama
Amia Megumi Yokoyama currently lives and works in Los Angeles and New York City. She is a multi-media artist who works with experimental animation, video, sculpture, and installation. Born into a bilingual, multi-cultural household, in the mid-west wasteland of suburban homogeneity – she has made her way to the metropolis.
Initial Conditions
My work is a continual re-examination of the concept of origin. The idea that the place from where I come or where we collectively come is a constantly moving/shifting location that is tied to the context of the present and to each other. What occurs in the moment when the boundedness of one collides with the boundedness of another? I am interested in ecstatic states of change not in a linear direction, but out in all directions, in favor of multiplicity and illegitimacy and fragmentation. Not in opposition to identity or history, but in defense of not fitting into assigned narratives, and simply not knowing. Not knowing as a defense to resist imposed dominant frameworks. I acknowledge the failure of language and definition to describe something that is interstitial, because definition precedes judgement which is used to create value. I am not interested in value. I am interested in relation, in intersectional moments of self-creation, in panoramas where everything is tirelessly reforming and alive, animated energies pushing-against pre-formed systems of categorization. A process of actualizing. A space called love.