Artwork Details
- Title
- Reach Out #3
- Artist
- Date
- 1989
- Location
- Dimensions
- overall: 34 x 72 1⁄2 x 3 in. (86.4 x 184.2 x 7.6 cm.)
- Credit Line
- Gift of Anthony T. Podesta
- Mediums
- Mediums Description
- natural, stained and painted wood
- Classifications
- Object Number
- 1998.152A-C
Artwork Description
Reach Out #3 is both an abstract sculpture and a portrayal of two people talking. In the 1980s, Washington, D.C., artist Yuriko Yamaguchi created a number of hanging wall structures that attempted to "bridge [a] distance or void" by "unifying two things" with wood. She was inspired to create this series by AT&T's advertising slogan urging customers to "reach out and touch someone." Here, she chose to link the two figures with a fragile twig that emphasizes the fleeting nature of their conversation. Yamaguchi also wanted to explore connections between the man-made and the natural, so she linked two milled and treated pieces of lumber with a stick that she found on a long walk in the woods. (Yuriko Yamaguchi, interview, December 20, 2005)
Works by this artist (15 items)
Videos
An interview with the artist Yuriko Yamaguchi. Yuriko Yamaguchi was born in Osaka, Japan, after the Second World War. When she moved to the United States at the age of twenty-three, she barely spoke English and turned to art to express herself, exploring her identity as a "tiny being in a vast universe." She links elements with wood or wires and hangs her works on walls and ceilings to represent her spiritual connections with the world around her. She uses only delicate materials, such as thin wires, resin, or twigs in order to evoke the simplicity of Japanese poetry. (Yamaguchi, "Rope as the Symbol Expressing the Integration of Physical Existence and Metaphysical Being," MFA thesis, University of Maryland, 1979)