STATEMENT

My work speaks through the familiarity of the home, where spaces of our everyday lives entwine with the memories and associations of our experiences. While a house is often referred to as a home, the concept of "home" is broader than a physical dwelling. Home is often a place of refuge and safety. Home is an experience as much as a specific place. Through my work, I am reflecting on the ways in which we construct our ideas of selfhood and origin through the spaces that we occupy—especially from our childhood home. 

On the most basic level, I see my process of painting as a type of remembrance, a memorial to the spaces that I once occupied and a preservation of the memories imparted in them. 

I want these spaces to be completely familiar but also vaguely peculiar. By incorporating slight distortions in scale and contradictions in perspective, the spaces in the paintings become inaccurate and fragmented. And in doing so, the home becomes an idealized notion, an eternal yearning, and also an unfeasible and hopeless pursuit.

BIO

Yayoi is an artist and educator living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence RI and her MFA in visual arts from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. Exhibitions include, Yayoi Asoma: Curated by Stephen Westfall, CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY; The Grass is Greener on the Other Side...So What?, Leo Fortuna Gallery, Hudson, NY; Artist As Teacher, The Studio, Armonk, NY, Remembering is Everything, Alter Space, San Francisco, CA; H-Art Gallery, Albany, NY; and her work has been reviewed in the New York Times and Hyperallergic. Asoma is an adjunct professor at Manhattanville College, teaches studio programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and teaches in NYC public schools through Studio in a School