Kento Saisho

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Recent Exhibition:

October 14 - November 11, 2023.

Skins, Holes, and Hovels

Kento Saisho, Erica Everage, Ari Salka

Documentation:

+ Checklists (Group; Saisho)

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As a sculptor and metal worker, Saisho works directly with material transformations—in this case, metals—and the shaping of voids through the production of vessels in varying phases, textures, and dimensions. Always appearing in altered states, his sculptures demonstrate a vessel’s peculiar simultaneity of presence and absence, filling and draining, skin and hole (and hovel): covers and leaks.

One of his works included in the group exhibition Skins, Holes, and Hovels—Four Legged Object—displays these paradoxical synchronicities through a dreamlike object that seems to remember a tooth, a stool, a cake—a vessel. Refusing any single association, strangling its names, the weird object is tangled-up in the cob webs between a domestic space and a body’s interior traits. This soporific slippage between objects, images, memories, and identities recurs across the objects, which appear as both unborn entities and as artefactual remains.

And though he is sculpturally oriented, drawing is a central part of his practice that shows up on the surfaces of his works—through his use of graphite, oil-stick, and other dry media—as well as in preliminary or alternative modes of his work where he is working on paper. (This is evidenced by the mixed-media surface of Four Legged Object.) More and more, drawing is a structural feature of his sculptures. Among his newest works, conical forms and wall-mounted vessels more loosely assembled than this previous works, there is a layering of gesture, fragment, and mark that resembles drawing.

Gathered in a population, his vessels guide viewers’ movements around a room, triangulating and mediating each encounter with one another’s voids. At times the void is sealed, at times the void is open—and at times the void is scattered and diffuse: each phase of his work provides a slipping glimpse of a body changing states while sheltering its lacks. With their yawns, clasps, gapes, and growls, Saisho brings the glyphic shapes of the vessels to the brink of speech—without ever saying anything at all.

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Bio

Kento Saisho (he/him) is an artist and metalworker currently based in Los Angeles, CA. He makes vigorously textured and tactile sculptural objects, vessels, and contemporary artifacts in steel that utilize and push the material’s potential for transformation. Born and raised in Salinas, CA, he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2016, where he was a Windgate-Lamar Fellowship recipient from the Center for Craft in Asheville, NC. Following this, he completed the Core Fellowship at the Penland School of Craft from 2018-2020. He was also a recipient of the inaugural Emerging Artist Cohort from the American Craft Council (ACC) in 2021 and the 2022 Career Advancement Grant from the Center for Craft. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and is currently represented by Citron Gallery in Asheville, NC.

{Biographical Information Courtesy of the Artist}

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Exhibitions with the Gallery: