Negative Entropy (Inscape Holding Breath Meditation, Quad), 2024
Mika Tajima
Pace Gallery
Once a week, Mika Tajima heads to her current show at Pace Gallery in New York with a bundle of fresh flowers. She walks into the ground-floor gallery in Chelsea and replaces the dying flowers in her sculpture Naturans (2024). The piece presents a geometric vase, perched atop a pedestal, filled with botanicals, all sitting beneath a fluorescent light. Over the course of the week, the flowers bake under the light, absorbing UV radiation, and gradually begin to emit an uncanny blue glow. Tajima’s floral routine is about more than just maintenance; it’s a symbolic gesture towards cycles of decay and rebirth. The flowers, radiant with light yet simultaneously withering away, are reminders to viewers of life’s transience.
This ritual is a cornerstone of Tajima’s show “Energetics,” on view at Pace through February 24th. The solo exhibition, the artist’s first in New York City in eight years, is named for the study of energy and its transformations. Tajima’s latest investigations play out through 13 works that contemplate the delicate balance of life amid the relentless march of technological progress.
Negative Entropy (Deep Brain Stimulation, Siena, Full Width, Exa), 2024
Mika Tajima
Pace Gallery
Upon entering the gallery, visitors are enveloped by the scents of eucalyptus and peppermint, a fragrance released by Vipassana (2024), a black pyramid-shaped sculpture on a pedestal with a hidden vaporizer. Through the aroma, Tajima intends to make guests become, in her words, “suddenly very aware” of their surroundings, and to bring them into the present moment.
In this state of heightened sensation, viewers then encounter three colossal textile works. Part of Tajima’s “Negative Entropy” series, these abstract, framed weavings have a painterly quality from afar and exude spellbinding energy due to their scale and the sharp color contrast of their sweeping gradients. Up close, the intricate woven threads emerge. Like Vipassana, these works engage the senses, though in this case, Tajima has visualized sound waves. To make these massive textiles, the Brooklyn-based artist translated audio into spectrograms—visual representations of sound frequency—then sent the output to a textile mill in the Netherlands, where they were woven with a digital jacquard loom.
Negative Entropy (Deep Brain Stimulation, Purple, Full Width, Exa), 2023
Mika Tajima
Pace Gallery
“I’m playing with a tension between materiality and immateriality,” Tajima said in an interview at the gallery. “While things are so digitized, they’re still literal. We literally still have our bodies and textiles and tactile things and tangible things, so me weaving something like sound became a perfect expression of that. It’s materializing something that is ephemeral and fleeting.… But like any kind of portrait or painting, it’s just the essence of something. It’s not complete.”
For earlier works from the “Negative Entropy” series, Tajima used field recordings taken in her former home of Philadelphia. These new works use auditory brainwave data, gathered through a collaboration with neurosurgeons using electro-stimulation in a procedure to repair brain function. With audio from the procedure provided by the neurosurgeons, Tajima created spectrograms, digitally assigning each frequency a color. She monumentalizes these blips of individual consciousness, blown up to vast proportions, to represent infinitesimal, fleeting moments of existence. Through this use of scale, Tajima is able “to play with this feeling of the individual among masses.”
Sense Object, (January 1st, 2023, United States), 2023
Mika Tajima
Pace Gallery
She also harnesses scale to great effect with the sculpture Sense Object (January 1, 2023, United States) (2024)—the heart of the exhibition, in which she holds up the relatively short life of digital technology against the vastness of geologic time. The sculpture comprises a large rose quartz stone on a in a glass case, adorned with a small, circular piece of glass. The glass is a 5D memory crystal—an experimental bit of nanotechnology colloquially known as the “Superman memory crystal”—that stores every post published on Twitter (now X) on January 1, 2023. The massive amount of data is a representation of our collective digital footprint, compressed into a single object.
Sense Object is featured in “Energetics” alongside three other rose quartz monoliths—part of Tajima’s “Pranayama” series, named after the Indian breathing ritual. Tajima chose to incorporate rose quartz both in reference to New Age spiritual practices and because of its piezoelectric qualities, or its ability to generate an electric charge. Specifically, she underscores how it is used to power timepieces. “It sometimes feels like time is moving so fast—if you think about digital technology and what’s happening with that,” she said. “But then here’s a timepiece: the crystal that has been keeping time since however many gazillion years since being formed…. There’s all these temporalities in the show that help situate the viewer and myself within this timeline of infinity.”
Negative Entropy (Inscape Holding Breath Meditation, Quad), 2024
Mika Tajima
Pace Gallery
Tajima’s hulking sculptures—stand-ins for human figures—also represent how people attempt to understand or control the body. The hollowed rose quartz crystals are dimpled with bronze jacuzzi jets, allowing viewers to see straight through the stones. The placements of these piercings are based on diagrams of acupuncture pressure points.
“If capitalism and technology are constantly trying to harness our energy…a lot of these both ancient and modern techniques are co-opted by capitalism to be in service of something else,” Tajima explained, citing the corporatization of spiritual practices like meditation as a technique to improve productivity. “There are all of these things that are in tension with each other because, of course, meditation ostensibly is really for the individual.”
Negative Entropy (Deep Brain Stimulation, Yellow, Full Width, Exa), 2024
Mika Tajima
Pace Gallery
Above all, the 13 artworks in “Energetics” interrogate human existence, weaving together the infinite and infinitesimal as markers of memory and experience. Through her artwork—embedded with brain spasms, Tweets, and ultraviolet flowers—Tajima reflects the ways that we constantly change alongside the rapid pace of technological advancement, whether we want to or not.
“I’m triangulating and echolocating myself,” she said. “I’m always joking about tricking the algorithm because you don’t want to be fully known. An individual is constantly in formation and transformation….like dying, but glowing.”
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/0tmHKsr
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