Once Was Now, Now is Over, Yet will Come

What is time? Can time be compared to a line – unique, straight and continuous? Does this line have a beginning or end? Few people have time to think about time. However, This is one of the fundamental questions of humankind dating as far back as antiquity. Yet some people do take the time to think of time. Lyota Yagi and Takehiro Iikawa are two of them.

Takehiro Iikawa and Lyota Yagi have totally different approaches towards time in their respective artistic practices. Yagi considers directly time-based media such as music or video. He manipulates and distorts time within music or video compositions, or uses physical media like CDs, LP records and music tapes. His series of work “CD” (2011) are created by peeling off vaporized aluminum from CD-R and sticking the pieces onto the canvas. Whatever the content used to be, the memories or the music from the CDs now exist between the fine layers of aluminum and canvas’ rainbow-like surface.