Artwork
Maxwell Raab
Portrait of Mika Tajima. Picture by Matt Dutier. Courtesy of Tempo Gallery.
As soon as per week, Mika Tajima brings a bouquet of flowers to a present exhibition at New York’s Tempo Gallery.She goes into Chelsea’s first-floor gallery and replaces dying flowers in sculpture pure particular person (2024). The piece showcases a geometrical vase on a pedestal crammed with vegetation, all sitting below fluorescent lights. Over the course of per week, the flowers bake within the gentle, take up ultraviolet radiation, and steadily start to glow with an unbelievable blue glow. Tajima’s floral course of is greater than upkeep; it is a symbolic gesture to the cycle of decay and rebirth. The flowers radiate and fade on the similar time, reminding the viewer of the brevity of life.
This ritual is the cornerstone of Tajima’s present “Energetics,” which can be on show in Pest till February 24. This solo exhibition is the artist’s first in New York in eight years and is known as after his analysis on power and its transformation. Tajima’s newest investigation unfolds by means of 13 works that take into account the fragile stability of life amid the relentless march of technological development.
Upon getting into the gallery, guests are surrounded by the aroma of eucalyptus and mint, the aroma launched by eucalyptus and mint. Vipassana (2024), a black pyramid-shaped sculpture on a base with a hidden evaporator. In her phrases, Tajima hopes that the scent will make company “instantly very conscious” of their environment and convey them into the current second.
On this intense state of feeling, the viewer encounters three monumental textile works. A part of Tajima’s “Negentropy” sequence, these summary framed weaves have a painterly high quality when considered from a distance and emanate an attractive power as a result of their scale and broad gradients of stark colour contrasts. Upon nearer inspection, intricately woven threads emerge.like Vipassana, these works enchantment to the senses, though on this case Tajima visualizes sound waves. To create these monumental textiles, the Brooklyn-based artist converts audio indicators into spectrograms (visible representations of sound frequencies), then sends the output to a textile mill within the Netherlands, the place they’re woven on digital jacquard looms.
“I’m taking part in with the strain between materiality and immateriality,” Tajima mentioned in an interview on the gallery. “Despite the fact that issues have change into so digital, they’re nonetheless literal. We truly nonetheless have our our bodies, our textiles, our tactile issues, our tangible issues, so the issues I weave like sound change into the proper expression. It makes the ephemeral It embodies one thing that has handed away…however like every sort of portrait or portray, it’s simply the essence of the factor. It’s not full.”
In early works within the “Negentropy” sequence, Tajima used discipline recordings shot at her former residence in Philadelphia. The brand new works use auditory brainwave knowledge, which is collected by means of collaboration with neurosurgeons utilizing electrical stimulation within the technique of repairing mind perform. Tajima created a spectrogram utilizing surgical audio supplied by a neurosurgeon, digitally assigning a colour to every frequency. She magnifies these particular person moments of consciousness to monumental proportions to signify the infinitesimally small, fleeting moments of existence. Via this use of scale, Tajima is ready to “play with the emotions of people inside the mass.”
She additionally used the size of the sculptures to nice impact Sense Object (January 1, 2023, United States) (2024)—the centerpiece of the exhibition, by which she illustrates the comparatively quick life span of digital expertise in opposition to the vastness of geological time. The sculpture consists of a giant rose quartz stone in a glass field, adorned with a small round piece of glass. The glass is a 5D reminiscence crystal – an experimental a part of nanotechnology, generally often called the “Superman Reminiscence Crystal” – that shops each put up posted on Twitter (now X) on January 1, 2023. The huge quantity of knowledge represents our collective digital footprint, compressed right into a single object.
Understand objects Showing in “Energetics” together with three different rose quartz boulders, they’re a part of Tajima’s “Pranayama” assortment, named after the Indian respiration ritual. Tajima selected to incorporate rose quartz not solely to embody New Age religious practices, but additionally due to its piezoelectric properties, or means to generate electrical fees. She highlighted the way it powers clocks. “If you consider digital expertise and issues associated to it, time generally feels prefer it flies by,” she mentioned. “However there is a timer right here: a crystal that is been holding time for numerous years since its formation… All of those temporalities within the present assist to put the viewers and myself on this infinite timeline.”
Mika Tajima, set up view of “Energetics” at Tempo Gallery, Chelsea. Courtesy of Tempo Gallery.
Tajima’s monumental sculptures—stand-ins for human figures—additionally signify how folks attempt to perceive or management the physique. The hollowed-out rose quartz crystal is indented with bronze Jacuzzi jets, permitting viewers to see straight by means of the stone. The situation of those piercings is predicated on a diagram of acupuncture stress factors.
“If capitalism and expertise are always making an attempt to harness our power…many historical and trendy applied sciences are being utilized by capitalism to serve different issues,” Tajima explains, citing the corporatization of religious practices like meditation as one of many causes. technique. expertise to enhance productiveness. “All of this stuff are contradictory as a result of, in fact, meditation is ostensibly private.”
Most significantly, the 13 artworks in “Energetics” query human existence, weaving collectively the infinite and the infinitesimal as markers of reminiscence and expertise. Via her paintings—embedded with mind spasms, tweets, and ultraviolet flowers—Tajima displays on the methods by which we’re always altering with the fast tempo of technological development, whether or not we would like it to or not.
“I am triangulating and echolocating myself,” she mentioned. “I at all times joke concerning the algorithm of deception, since you do not need to be fully understood. An individual is continually forming and remodeling… like dying, however shining once more.”
Maxwell Raab
Maxwell Rabb is a employees author at Artsy.
