Bottom

"Bottom" is a silkscreen on rubber whose title points downward — toward the substrate, the ground, the lowest stratum of an image. In a discipline structured by the layering of inks atop a base, the title foregrounds what is usually subordinated: the surface that receives the print rather than the marks that ride upon it. Yoshioka's choice of rubber is consistent with this attention to the bottom layer; rubber asserts its own presence, its tactile elasticity, in a way that paper conventionally suppresses. The piece reflects his ongoing project of using non-standard substrates — alongside laser-engraved limestone and photogrammetry-based prints — to push silkscreen out of its usual transparent function and into a register where surface and image are co-equal. As an instructor at Kyoto City University of Arts, Yoshioka has framed such inversions as deliberately pedagogical: a means of denaturalizing the assumptions students bring to the printed image.