Tokyo Gallery + BTAP will present a solo exhibition by Saya Irie entitled “Sparkling Everyday Dust,” opening Saturday, October 4, 2025. This will be her second solo exhibition at the gallery since her first in 2013.
Born in 1983 in Okayama Prefecture, Saya Irie is an artist who has been acclaimed for her unique technique of erasing two-dimensional images with an eraser and transforming the resulting eraser dust into three-dimensional forms. Starting from existing images, ranging from everyday items like candy boxes and paper bags to antiques such as hanging scrolls, natural history paintings, and old photographs, Irie defamiliarizes them and reconstructs them into new myths.
“Sparkling Everyday Dust” will showcase works from several series, including Moku Dogu Jizo Dust, which reconfigures symbols of consumer society into prayer-like forms in an effort to establish a kind of contemporary corpus of collective imagery, and the relief work Ika Jitte Kannon Dust, created during a residency in Aomori.
Ika Jitte Kannon Dust is a massive sculptural form created by superimposing a squid onto a Kannon statue. Rooted in a rich marine and gastronomic culture, the work manifests prayers and memories carved into cardboard as a new monument. The “Birds Dust” series, which uses bird field guides as a material, deploys the residue of images erased from these guides to create small three-dimensional birds, thereby resurrecting their liberated forms that have been freed from a planar surface. In addition, using urban photography from the Showa era, more experimental pieces that seek to transform various vestiges and remnants from this period into forms that transcend time while retaining the same composition will be presented. By scooping up the spirituality and memories hidden within fragments of everyday life, these series emerge as myths of a kind that are open to the future.
Irie’s practice traverses the realms of information and matter, everyday life and faith, and documentation and creation, presenting an art that “makes the invisible visible.” From the dust of everyday life, where consumption and memory intersect, a new, sparkling and radiant world comes into being.
