Past Solo Exhibition
Tabaimo: emerge as 03.04.2010 — 08.05.2010
Information
Event has ended
3 April - 8 May 2010
About The Exhibition
Hearts, brains, insects and veins will “emerge as” 22 new subversive works on paper by Japanese artist, Tabaimo. She expounded on STPI’s print and papermaking capabilities to build up layers upon layers of stories, embodied in bizarre textured paper evocative of bruised skin, insect bodies and lacerated wallpaper. The new works are delicate as they are poetic and powerful.
Tabaimo’s new Wallpaper series project a suspenseful Hitchcock-esque interior, covered in repetitive pattern, shadows and burnt marks. The peeled off layers of wallpaper reveal an uncanny visual labyrinth of human anatomy, a tangible extension of Tabaimo’s “dolefullhouse” screening at the 52nd Venice Biennale, featuring hands arranging doll house furniture and frantically scratching walls to expose a pulsating heart and brain underneath.
Edition works show through, is a mapping of the human nervous system, highlighting vital organs such as the heart and brain on delicate Japanese Gampi paper intimating skin membrane and suspended with fish line, sewn in surgical precision.
Tabaimo suffered from severe dermatitis and her afflicted hands used to impede her art-making, a sensation she describes as insects crawling under her skin, which prefigures in works such as, in-inner, where dismembered insect parts appear beneath the skin. Overnight translates Tabaimo’s subconscious vision of mounting insect parts that tick away time like an hourglass, deep forest consists of silkscreened insects forms, confined in box embedded into paper and skinspots are large-scale works with round “potholes” that reveal fragments of insect drawings.
About the artist
Tabaimo
Residency in 2008
Tabaimo (b. 1975, Hyogo, Japan; based in Nagano, Japan) is known for her immersive video installations that explore the undercurrents of contemporary Japanese society. Her animated narratives often set mundane characters within everyday environments such as domestic interiors and communal spaces. They unveil moments of irrationality and aggression that quickly disappear behind a facade of social civility, evoking the fragmented, unstable relationship between public and private worlds.
Drawn by hand then digitally animated, Tabaimo’s images recall the styles of manga, anime and ukiyo-e—traditional Japanese woodblock prints popularised in the Edo period—with their rich palettes, shading and linework. In Japanese Commuter Train (2001), a six-screen installation that encloses viewers in a simulated suburban train ride, passengers come and go while remaining nonchalant as strange activities occur. A massive rooster appears by the window, disembodied hands crawl along the cabin, and some individuals are rolled into a sushi roll—all while fellow commuters appear detached and disengaged.
Tabaimo obtained her BFA from Kyoto University of Art And Design in 1999. Her work is held in major collections including Asia Society and Museum, New York; Birmingham Museum of Art; The Cleveland Museum of Art; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Art, Osaka; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Seattle Art Museum; and Yokohama Museum of Art.