Faces to Hide

Photo Catalogue Video Catalogue

This fall, while in residence with the SPACES Worlds Artist Program, Japanese artist Yuka Oyama and German artist Axel Ruoff will collaborate on a multi-media installation centered on how Clevelanders use objects to transform their appearance and mediate their identities.

Oyama's work combines her training in jewelry-making and wearable art with social practice to craft unique participation-based art pieces. Film-maker and painter Ruoff's work brings amateur actors and actresses to real-life locations to play out their fantasies, dreams, nightmares and memories, resulting in surreal scenes that skate the boundary between reality and fiction.

During their 6-week residency in Cleveland, Oyama and Ruoff will join forces to create an installation based off in-depth dialogues with a small group of Clevelanders about their relationships with objects, and how certain objects change the face they present to the world.

Oyama and Ruoff will seek out Clevelanders who have extraordinary relationships with objects-as obsessions, status symbols, or actual extensions of their personalities. They will talk with each participant about how these objects transform their identities by hiding, confirming, or threatening them.

The resulting work will weave together paintings, drawings, video and wearable objects to intimately reflect the content of these conversations.

Created with flickr slideshow.