Arts and Letters

In her installations and performances, Aki Sasamoto uses visual metaphor and absurdist humor to explore life’s biggest questions and most mundane activities, which often converge in the everyday objects she uses. In previous performances, the artist tested her psychological breaking point on a trampoline, worked through hygiene neuroses with the help of a modified washer and dryer, and conveyed her romantic relationships as a line of empty beer bottles falling into a trashcan one by one after a happy hour gone wrong.

Sasamoto’s installation and performance Squirrel Ways (2022), which premieres in the United States at Arts and Letters, has the semblance of a living room. It is constructed from modular shutters, doors, and mulberry paper sliding screens. Colorful personal objects are faintly visible through the screens, whose indeterminate design falls somewhere between door, room divider, and wall. A clothesline hangs overhead with a day’s laundry.

In a series of improvised performances, Sasamoto follows the questions this fluid environment raises. At what point does outside become inside? At what time in the cycle does dirty laundry become clean? At what depth does the surface of the ocean begin? The ambiguity of transition, or the “thickness of the border,” as Sasamoto puts it, is something the artist considers with deadpan humor as she transforms the work’s movable barriers into drawing surfaces and peepholes, or discovers fishing lures, rulers, and sponges squirreled away within its paper compartments.

Sasamoto will perform Squirrel Ways on Saturday evenings at sunset in March, April, and May. The installation is on view by appointment and in conjunction with free guided tours of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.