The Brooklyn Rail

Aki Sasamoto likes to get inside things. Aluminum tubing, a dumpster, a washing machine, a sink: being inside narrows attention to the immediate moment, filtering away distractions and opening new perspectives. For Sasamoto, a multidisciplinary artist known for playfully strange installations and performances, interiors are sites for aesthetic exploration. As Sasamoto explains in the text “Reverse Engineering,” getting inside allows her to “dream about a new place where objects are moving and dancing freely.” It is a method for generating possibilities.

“Reverse Engineering” is one of several essays included in Point Reflection, Sasamoto’s first book, newly published by the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) and the Queens Museum. Point Reflection offers multiple points of entry. It combines the artist’s improvisational writings, transcripts of interviews she conducted with scientist-collaborators, and critical responses by curators Lumi Tan and Hitomi Iwasaki with full-color documentation of Sink or Float (2022), Sasamoto’s installation at the 2022 Venice Biennale, and a new installation, performance and video work (also titled Point Reflection) at the Queens Museum. Kyla Arsadjaja’s beautiful design makes holding Point Reflection feel like walking through one of the artist’s installations. The book’s front and back covers are perforated like the air-hockey-inspired float tables Sasamoto created for Sink or Float. Spots of glossy silver show through the holes, beckoning the reader inside. Ample white margins surround Point Reflection’s various texts. The casual intimacy they suggest heightens the immersive power of the photographs and video stills that stretch across two-page spreads in its middle section.

Sasamoto’s essays, her first published writing, sketch what she imagines as the first half of her life in stories from childhood through her current efforts to balance artmaking, teaching, and motherhood. For example, the artist remembers having to “travel far, to foreign countries, to find the like-minded” after she came out, and describes dancing with a lover and learning how to box. Raising a child has shifted the artist’s perspective on these experiences. Her life and work make different sense now than they had before. She describes this in mathematical terms in the first essay, “Generation Sandwich.” Recalling a geometry lesson about curves that repeat after passing through particular coordinates on a graph, she writes, “I kind of know what to expect from a life event, just like I know the curve of the other half of the graph. And because a reflected shape can be more beautiful than expected, I live my life excited about collecting these expected surprises.”

One surprise has been the central role snails have played in her recent work. They float across most of Point Reflection’s pages. As Tan confirms in her comprehensive critical essay, Sasamoto started thinking about snails after seeing a colony under a bridge in rural France. Curiosity turned to obsession, as the artist herself explains in “Snail Tale,” a short lyric essay with numbered sections, when she learned about the consequences of their spirals. “Snails cannot mate unless they twirl in the same direction!” Most twirl in a clockwise direction, a dominant trait, she discovers, across many species. The relative rarity of counterclockwise shells makes them an object of scientific research.

Sasamoto integrated snail shells into one of her ongoing projects. She learned that blown air makes snail shells spin. After a drag show, she tested what would happen when she added a feather to one or two in a larger group. The feathered snails, the outsiders, spin faster and counterclockwise. The experiments culminated in Sink or Float and the video component of Point Reflection.

She summarizes these works’ principle insights in “Snail Tale”: “Patterns of behavior are somewhat predictable. But once in a while they can surprise you. They surprise you when you are attempting—or when you are least expecting—to find yourself in the pattern.” Sasamoto writes as a mother and artist creating work that spills over generic boundaries. Perhaps because of her own trajectories, from Kanagawa, Japan, to Brooklyn, and from dance to sculpture, installation, and performance, she trusts what emerges through the artistic process. “I look back into the past. I see now the thread that I didn’t know existed.”

Sasamoto tests her aesthetic convictions in an interview with biologist Masaki Hoso. Titled “Volition, Behavior, Determinism,” their wonderful exchange centers on the tensions that structure individuals’ relationships to their communities. In evolutionary terms, an individual’s distinctiveness is a community resource. Genetic variations begin as accidents, then, through generational cycles of reproduction, accumulate into community-wide adaptations. Variations that promote survival persist and those that don’t recede. “Without oddballs, society can’t sustain itself,” Hoso confirms.

The catch in the evolutionary story is that what helps the group harms the individual. Sasamoto and Hoso agree that human communities are notorious for excluding oddballs and pressuring them to conform. Sasamoto uses this friction as an element in her work, as one more ingredient in the “mixology of memory, adrenaline, and self-assessment” essential to her creative process. And that’s how she ended up inside a sink blowing air through a straw to keep snail shells twirling on a Plexiglas table.