Yasuko Toyoshima Web Site | WORKS / ColorCompensation−3

Color Compensation−3 (2006-)

Using permanent markers, I draw lines in various colors on the surface of the top and side panels of a clear acrylic case set on a pedestal. The standardized neutral transparency case typically designates the containment of an artwork or artifact within a museum setting and conditions our viewing habit of peering into each case. In this particular work, my intervention subverts the purpose of the case as “a thing itself that is not an object to view” but as a plane through which to gaze at something else contained within. Here, what is contained is 201 color cards whose colors are altered when viewed through the random colors applied on the case. Viewing the color cards through my color drawings becomes an exercise of “mixing colors” by perception alone. The case functions like a “color compensation filter.” The light that passes through the case is no longer neutral, since the lines I had drawn transformed the clear case into multi-color gels. It is a manner of alluding to the fact that we cannot view the world with the assumption of pure nature. Human intervention and demarcation is visible everywhere. Whatever we see with our naked eye has to pass through the filter—the chaos or order—of the artifice we have created and constructed.