Collecting, Rearranging and Reinventing: Ray Yoshida’s Comic Works

Throughout his career artist Ray Yoshida produced a long series of collages featuring excerpts from comic books. The working process includes the extraction of single elements out of a comic strip and their rearrangements in grids or lines. Abstracted from their context, the fragments are introduced into a new order, deprived of narrative, but in search for a new meaning.

While we usually think of collage as a medium destined to the creation of a new image, for Yoshida it helps to decontexualize particles out of a descriptive device, such as a comic story, and recompose them into a different compositional and semantic logic. The arrays underline resonances among disparate pieces of a collection of images and trace new surreal stories where objects communicate and scenes deflagrate.

The process behind these works relates directly with Yashida’s passion for collecting objects from all over the world which made his Chicago residence a sort of pop reminder to famous John Soane house. From vernacular pieces to everyday objects, toys, masks and paintings, Yashida’s universe was nourished by a multitude of influences. The pieces all managed to coexist despite their differences thanks to the artist’s ability to arrange them in neat series.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Further readings:

Reviving the Spirit of an Artist Through His Personal Collection by Jillian Steinhauer on Hyperallergic

The Open Eye: The Home Collection of Ray Yoshida by John Foster on The Design Observer