Single-Action

SINGLE-ACTION features two large-scale inflatable sculptures accompanied by new work in glazed ceramics set in a field of hundreds of mylar balloons designed by the artist, and a performance which integrates the physical installation into one artistic gesture. The term single-action refers to a type of firearm trigger, typically used in shotguns and rifles, that requires an initial setup of the firing mechanism, such as the pumping of a shotgun’s fore-end before a bullet is discharged. For Ayakamay, this potential destructive force can be found in the heated rhetoric of global politics in the Pacific, the events leading up to, and following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, and the proliferation of guns throughout the United States including her home state of Tennessee. Each of the objects in the exhibition is a play on a traditional stamped metal toy fish popular in Japan during the artist’s childhood; some are quite literal in their quotation, while others, especially the large inflatables are more military aircraft than fish. For the artist, this fish represents a false and infantile sense of innocence that exists in the Japanese concept of kawaii a cuteness that so very often rings hollow. The mylar balloons, offered as gifts to gallery visitors, in the exhibition are simultaneously a joyous mass of this traditional toy and a fish kill, the often mysterious die-offs of entire populations of fish. They are reminiscent of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Placebo), but this time the endless supply of shiny cellophane wrappings are the untold environmental impacts of radioactive pollution released from the shores of Honshu island. The two large inflatable sculptures are arranged in the space as the two largest islands of Japan, Hokkaido and Honshu, like two fish kissing in the waters of the Pacific. They are beautiful objects that seem to be built for speed through some imaginary medium beyond their physical nature in the gallery space, inflated to a level of maximum surface tension, prepared for action. For the performance aspect of the exhibition, Ayakamay, dressed in a warning red dress with her face obscured by a red scarf, walks through the sea of mylar fish and drives a sharpened stainless steel pin into the larger sculpture, referencing the metaphoric puncture that occurred at Fukushima, after which the twenty-foot long sculpture slowly deflates until it has collapsed completely.