Jon Sasaki | I Would Rather Share A Pumpkin Than Be Lonely On A Velvet Cushion

Jon Sasaki

I Would Rather Share A Pumpkin Than Be Lonely On A Velvet Cushion

Buffalo, USA: Hallways, 2022

12 pp., 28 x 21.5 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

A slim exhibition catalogue documenting the always-brilliant Jon Sasaki's current exhibition at Hallwalls, in Buffalo, New York. 

The show features three works: Improvised Travel Adapters, A Constellation For Every Person On Earth and the titular Pumpkin piece. 

Improvised Travel Adapters is a series of photographs documenting precarious and dangerous looking 

makeshift electrical outlet adaptors. The series, which began in 2018 and is ongoing, includes a number of MacGyvered items travellers might carry in their luggage, repurposed to allow their small electrical appliances to work in international sockets. 

A Constellation For Every Person On Earth features a computer-controlled set of patio lights which cycles through all 8,589,934,592 permutations of thirty-three bulbs, illuminated for five to ten seconds. 

The work refers to the Pan American Exposition held in Buffalo, in 1901, where every building was outlined in incandescent lights. When the two-million-plus bulbs were turned on simultaneously, the effect was said to be staggering. William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States excitedly attended the event, where he was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz.

Despite the number of lightbulbs illuminating the exteriors of the buildings at the fair, the emergency hospital had no electric lighting and the president was attended to by doctors while a pan reflected sunlight onto the operating table. McKinley did not survive. 

I Would Rather Share A Pumpkin Than Be Lonely On A Velvet Cushion takes its title from a Henry David Thoreau quote and features a group of flailing air-dancers perched atop an inflatable pumpkin. 

The exhibition, which opened September 16th, closes this Friday, October 28th. 

"The piece would invite a multitude of free-associations. Visitors might envision constellations of stars, and attempt to "connect the dots" as humans have done for eons. They might take the opportunity to think about chance, randomness, uniqueness in our genetic makeup, the nature of individuality; they might contemplate the disparity between human and geological timescales, the vastness of the cosmos, exponential population growth and so on and so on. And possibly they might give some thought to the Pan-American Exhibition of 1901, where Nikola Tesla visited in order to see the illuminations that he helped create. Apparently, according to some accounts, his mind was already on the next project… finding a way to communicate with any inhabitants of the planet Mars.1 So as Tesla was looking at Buffalo's electric lights, his imagination was transposing them to the celestial sphere, bulbs became stars and distant planetary destinations for his messages. He was reaching out to the new individuals he hoped to encounter there… an exchange that would not happen in his transitory lifetime."

- Jon Sasaki