Dust in the Teeth of the Comb

aaploit presents Dust in the Teeth of the Comb, a three-person exhibition featuring Ishiodori Michi, Ishiguro Hikaru, and Shikura Toka, on view from March 14 through March 30, 2025. This exhibition emerged from conversations among the three artists, with aaploit participating in the dialogue and organizing the project.

With the end of grand narratives and the arrival of an age of uncertainty, Matsui Midori has identified a shared attitude among those who create individual, unique "idioms" within dominant culture—finding new ways to perceive the world and to act within it.¹ In contemporary art, the gaze toward the everyday is continuously renewed. This is not a matter of simply extracting or re-presenting daily life, but rather a practice of reconstructing reality and discovering new meaning within it.

What the three artists share is an exploration of the discomfort and invisible territories latent in the everyday.

Ishiodori Michi investigates the boundary between materiality and immateriality through the medium of paper clay, presenting inverted relationships between the fictional and the real. Her method constitutes a return to primitive expression while simultaneously posing ontological questions about existence in the present.

Ishiguro Hikaru's practice extracts the concept of the interface from Marcel Duchamp's "inframince," developing her own interpretation. The exploration of the zone where the resonance dwelling in matter and the spirit that perceives it intersect originates in this attention to the interface. At the same time, through dialogue with the self via the sign of "the person," she sublimates the traces that emerge from the oscillation between introspection and resistance into her work. This duality carries the reach to question the very nature of subjectivity in our time.

Shikura Toka deliberately deconstructs and reconstructs remembered landscapes and motifs. The "displacements" and "erasures" that arise in this process move beyond visual pleasure to become inquiries into the very structure of our perception and cognition.

Though the works of the three artists appear to be grounded in personal experience and sensation, they are in fact sublimations—through individual perspectives—of the subtle discomforts and discoveries that each of us encounters in daily life. They offer an awareness of sensations we all carry yet have overlooked, while suggesting new possibilities for expression in contemporary art. Together with an accompanying dialogue project with contemporary art researcher Yoshida Risa, this exhibition becomes an attempt to explore what expression means in the present.

The dust that dwells in the teeth of a comb held close to daily life becomes a poetics of overlooked, minute existence.

¹ Matsui Midori. The Age of Micro-Pop: The Door to Summer. PARCO Publishing, 2007. pp. 30–32.

For inquiries regarding the exhibition, please contact info@aaploit.com.