GALLERY ETHER is pleased to announce "Invade", our first exhibition with Japanese artist Yuki Takeshima, featuring a sizable collection of three dimensional works exploring concepts of multicultural identity and the object as artifact. Exhibition to be held March 2nd through 23rd, 2024.

“Objects are our way of interacting with the world. We use them as translation tools for our desires and intentions. They form the way we act, consume, and live. Their physicality - shape, form and texture - is often dictated by a consensus between us: its users. Together we expect these tools to meet certain required conditions and functions.

We find ourselves moving around the world in a similar fashion to objects. We are sculpted by our context and culture only to find ourselves in a foreign environment with completely different requirements and expectations. Invade is an investigation of these phenomena.

Second and third-generation immigrant children are often conditioned to adopt the so-called homeland as part of their identity. They inherit a bond with the culture from their parents, leading them to identify themselves with it.

Arriving in Tokyo was such a jarring experience, to feel so disconnected and foreign to a place I was raised to believe I belonged to. I was overwhelmed by the objects in life here - objects I didn’t understand yet were forced upon me as daily tools.

My attempt at regaining control was through these everyday objects in Japanese life. Through making these objects my own, I found a way to reacquaint myself with being Japanese and to appreciate the objects that populate this culture.

This exhibition is a collection of artifacts that formed my life here. They are somewhat familiar yet still strange to me.”

- Yuki Takeshima