November 15, 2013 - January 17, 2014

Faces to Hide

Strategies to Transform Identity

Yuka Oyama, Axel Ruoff

Part of SWAP

Faces to Hide
U10 - Berliner Underground Maerchen

U10 - Berliner Underground Maerchen  Yuka Oyama and Axel Ruoff | 2010 | Peformance | Photo by Axel Ruoff. Courtesy of the artists.

Stubborn Lives of Objects

Stubborn Lives of Objects  Yuka Oyama | 2013 | Live Sculpture | Photo by Jane Saks. Courtesy of the artist.

Faces to Hide: Strategies to Transform Identity  Yuka Oyama, Axel Ruoff | 2013 | Photo Jerry Mann

Three Dworves  Axel Ruoff | 2013 | Painting | Photo by Axel Ruoff. Courtesy of the artist.

project photos  Yuka Oyama and Axel Ruoff | 2013 | Mixed media/ sponge foam | Photo by Axel Ruoff. Courtesy of the artist

Photo Catalogue Video Catalogue

This fall, while in residence with the SPACES Worlds Artist Program, Japanese artist Yuka Oyama and German artist Axel Ruoff will collaborate on a multi-media installation centered on how Clevelanders use objects to transform their appearance and mediate their identities.

Oyama's work combines her training in jewelry-making and wearable art with social practice to craft unique participation-based art pieces. Film-maker and painter Ruoff's work brings amateur actors and actresses to real-life locations to play out their fantasies, dreams, nightmares and memories, resulting in surreal scenes that skate the boundary between reality and fiction.

During their 6-week residency in Cleveland, Oyama and Ruoff will join forces to create an installation based off in-depth dialogues with a small group of Clevelanders about their relationships with objects, and how certain objects change the face they present to the world.

Oyama and Ruoff will seek out Clevelanders who have extraordinary relationships with objects-as obsessions, status symbols, or actual extensions of their personalities. They will talk with each participant about how these objects transform their identities by hiding, confirming, or threatening them.

The resulting work will weave together paintings, drawings, video and wearable objects to intimately reflect the content of these conversations.


Created with flickr slideshow.

About the Artists

Yuka Oyama

Yuka Oyama (Born in Tokyo, Japan. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.) studied Jewelry/Light Metals at Rhode Island School of Design and received her MA in Sculpture and Jewelry at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in Germany. Oyama brings broad experience in participation/dialogue-based art to her knowledge and practice... go to artist page

Axel Ruoff

Axel Ruoff's (Born in Munich, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany) work is grounded in his study of literature and philosophy at the Free University in Berlin and the University of Provence in Marseille. Ruoff's film and literary works examines the intersection between reality and fiction and the contradictions... go to artist page

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