Shie Kasai's artistic practice involves the creation of site-specific installations and animation to explore time and space. Kasai's projects feature muku, a dog expressing an exploratory nature. muku activates the backgrounds and spaces as she wonders through them. As a thematic character, an automatic empathy and connection is quickly achieved, particularly as muku exhibits a cleverness in her actions.

The distance of memory and the process of remembering is key in Kasai's exploration. Thus, the work focuses on representing a psychological and physical space, a space that is evoked through the use of visual effects, animation and the loving character muku. The 'cut and paste' nature of Kasai's animation techniques provides an appropriate tool to manipulate space and action. In very formal terms, angle and perspective is key to Kasai's production. Kasai highlights angles in her drawings and animations to direct us further into the process of seeing - carefully maintaining the realities of 2-D space (the paper or the flat computer screen) and the 3-D illusionist spaces depicted on the surfaces. Kasai refers to the use of perspective as a way to allow for the understanding of abstract spatial systems in a more ordered manner; these systems are communicated to others without attempting to represent a definite world-view. Kasai's intention lies in an effort to examine perspectives, regardless of their origin, both culturally and formally, and proposes a variation of beginnings and ends.

Gallery 101 is excited to present Shie Kasai's web site project, re-formatted and re-created from video to specifically exist on the web. Her work reiterates that animation cannot be achieved without first understanding the fundamental principle of the human eye: the persistence of vision.And so, she plays with the graphic representation of drawings to show movement.

Among the seamless assumption of the virtual, we present the seams of Shie Kasai's work...

-- Jessie Lacayo, Curator