YUJI AGEMATSU. Times Square Times (Kodak All-Stars)

About

Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce the opening, on Saturday, November 14th, of Yuji Agematsu’s Times Square Times (Kodak All-Stars), his third one-person exhibition at the gallery. The show will be held at our 88 Eldridge Street location.

In 2003-2004, Yuji Agematsu began to take photographs of Times Square on nightly walks. After four years of continual improvisational shooting (2003/04-07), he wound up with something much too original for the genre of street photography, and yet no definitive artwork emerged, prior to this current installation. Over the intermittent years, Agematsu instead used the photographs in live performances, “tuning” and playing slide projections with audio recordings captured in the street with his tape deck, unaware that the ringing of Max Neuhaus’ long-term sonic environment Times Square had made its way into his own recordings.

Agematsu first presented selections of these 35mm slides in multi-media performances in the basement of Anthology Film Archives in 2005, at SculptureCenter in 2010, and later in a Portland, Oregon gymnasium. In these situations, Agematsu performed for the venue’s respective audiences with slides accompanied by sound or music. His actions—improvised not planned—were carried out for quite varied lengths of time, anywhere from just short of an hour to as long as six. This past year, a decade and more after taking the pictures, the artist went in the other direction, editing the photographs into a definitive work in which a fixed procession of some 382 photographs flicker and loop from six 35mm slide projectors.

Yuji Agematsu (b. 1956, Kanagawa, Japan) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Agematsu studied with Tokio Hasegawa, a member of the band Taj Mahal Travellers, and the jazz drummer and choreographer Milford Graves. He has had solo exhibitions at Miguel Abreu Gallery (New York, 2017 & 2019), Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius, 2019), Lulu (Mexico City, 2019), the Power Station (Dallas, 2018), Artspeak (Vancouver, 2014), Real Fine Arts (Brooklyn, 2012 & 2014), Anthology Film Archives (New York, 2004), and TZ’Art & Co. (New York, 1994). In 2014, Agematsu mounted a large scale exhibition at Yale Union (Portland, OR), which was accompanied by the monograph ZIP: 01–01–14…12–31–14, published by Yale Union, Thea Westreich Wagner/Ethan Wagner Publications, and Artspeak. Agematsu was prominently included in the 57th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2018), and was previously shown in Speak Lokal, Kunsthalle Zurich (2017), Serialities, organized by Olivier Renaud-Clément, Hauser & Wirth (New York, 2017), The Keeper, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, New Museum (New York, 2016), and Looking Back / The 7th White Columns Annual, selected by Richard Birkett (2013).

His performances have taken place at the Swiss Institute (New York, 2018), Artists Space (New York, 2017), and as part of the solo presentation Walk on A, B, C, organized by Jay Sanders for the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 2016). His work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, The Israel Museum, The Columbus Museum of Art, the Loewe Foundation, and the Pinault Collection.

In February, 2021, Agematsu will mount a solo exhibition at The Secession, Vienna, featuring a full year of his well-known Zip works.