EXHIBITION
KARL LARSSON

FOX MASK

1:1 An exhibition is a room with things. What did you say? A concept a technology for remembering. A mask a tool for forgetting. That small strip of doubt separating face and image. At the center of the exhibition is a photograph from the collection of W.B. Yeats. It is a picture of Michio Ito in his fox mask.* There are also objects: a replica of an antique folding chair, a carpet as make-up, the grey linen clothing of a stagehand. Invisible men moving invisible objects over an invisible stage.

*Michio Ito was a Japanese dancer who moved to Britain 1913 where he met Ezra Pound who introduced him to contemporaries such as W.B. Yeats. Ito started to work for Pound as a translator and followed him into a newly sparked interest for Noh theater. While working on the Japanese manuscripts, Ito began rehearsing gestures and movements related to the ancient art form. He became not only a translator, but a medium in himself, allowing for new forms of poetry to emerge.
**For Yeats the mask was important as a poetic device in a search for a personal (rather than a subjective) expression. This search was also one of medium, of form.

1:1 A mask is a cultural figure, a source of naive knowledge.** There is no story, but there are images an intellect could never make. Are artworks there to be performed? I see you from the inside of a face. Worn objects we might use, dead animals we can pretend to be. Eyes rolling, breath heaving. Listen, I knew you from before you pretended not to know me. I am still part of everything here. Don’t you want more? Are you against or for forgetting? I mean, are you on your way to becoming something else?