Haydens is pleased to present Garage Days Re-revisited Returnal Return Redux (Reprised..), a solo exhibition by Masato Takasaka at Haydens, Brunswick East.

Masato Takasaka (b. 1977, Melbourne, Australia) is a Japanese Australian visual artist, writer, curator and sometimes musician. He holds a PhD in Visual Arts from Monash University and is a Lecturer in Visual Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne. Previously having performed as a lead guitarist in uber-hip rock bands as well as practicing as a visual artist, Masato thinks about his studio practice in musical terms, describing his aesthetic as an iPod Shuffle: playing the greatest hits of 20th century avant-garde art, with references to constructivism, dada, pop and minimalism alongside the back catalogue of his own greatest hits.

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“How do you get to be an artist? How do you get to be a real artist? Or even a fake artist? Perhaps as distinguished from a ‘Sunday painter,’ or some such? Are these even questions, let alone real questions? After all, ‘art’ itself — although maybe ‘itself’ should itself be in scare quotes here — is not really a real thing, right? It’s just a semblance, a creation, an invention on the basis of a kind of local social practice that doesn’t have any ultimate definition or substance, any essence that could enable us to recognise it as such. Actually, it doesn’t even lack an essence either, since the very flight from essence might in turn become a kind of point which could potentially permit a stabilization of its evanescent dissembling.”

- Excerpt from Justin Clemens accompanying essay