Mika Tajima: NEGATIVE ENTROPY

MIKA TAJIMA Negative Entropy March 2 – April 13, 2014 | 11 Rivington St & 195 Chrystie St, NY

Eleven Rivington is pleased to present the new work of Mika Tajima, in her first solo exhibition in New York City in three years and her first with the gallery. The exhibition at 195 Chrystie Street, on view from March 2 – April 13, 2014 features a series of abstract woven portraits, transparent paintings, and a sand sculpture.  Tajima recently showed her work at The Mori Museum, Tokyo and and a solo project at Art in General, New York.

The works included in the exhibition, titled Negative Entropy, extend Tajima’s interrogation of the built environment and the maximized performing subject to the global flow of life energies sought by unraveling systems.  

Entropy is a measure of internal disorder in a naturally decaying system.  To stem an accelerated end, a system consumes negative entropy (negentropy) from its external environment to sustain itself.  In our risk society, negentropy is the force that seeks ordered behavior, leads to a regulated predictable state, and privileges its own well being at the expense of something else.

The series of woven wall works, also titled Negative Entropy, are acoustic portraits of either aging factories that employ industrial textile Jacquard looms (an early precursor to digital technology) or server colocation centers that comprise today’s outsourced data infrastructure.  These works are simultaneously images and material records of their own production.  The artist recorded production sounds at several locations in the once-booming industrial areas of southeastern Pennsylvania as well as a data center network in Philadelphia, a city seeking to take part in the rising data and communications sector. *

These recordings were then transmuted into digital image files and physically interpreted by a weaving designer into a Jacquard fabric. The woven textiles were then stretched over custom acoustic panels whereby they assume the function of sound deadening tiles, the same type used in recording studios to isolate sounds made by individual performers.  The looms inscribe their own obsolescence, producing a mute visualization of vacant factories and the ascendant industry of immaterial abstractions.

A floor-based ashtray sculpture of polished mirror contains a dry sand landscape stamped with a geometric pattern.  It is a relic of a social space that was once a communal reprieve from the workday—the huddled smoke break, now atomized into stolen solitary moments. Vapor is the fleeting visual trace of a material transformation and its dissipation into full abstraction.  

The reverse spray enameled acrylic objects that comprise the Furniture Art series in the exhibition are transparent shells that contain blooming paint mists made solid on its interior surface.  Each piece in this ambient painting series is subtitled by a geographic location—Medillin, Kuala Lumpur, Osaka, Sainte-Honorine-des-Pertes—drawing on the psychogeographic associations produced by the affective names of industrial colors and paints.  Furniture Art refers to Erik Satie's Furniture Music (Musique d’ameublement)—a series of infinitely repetitive compositions meant to be background music for different occasions (aural decor).  Spray paint is where solid substance meets air.  

Mika Tajima was born 1975 in Los Angeles and currently lives and works in NY.  She was educated at Bryn Mawr College (BA) and Columbia University (MFA).  She has exhibited widely in the US and internationally, including exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; The Aspen Art Museum, CO; The Seattle Art Museum, WA; Bass Art Museum, FL; X Initiative, NY; The Kitchen, NY; and Swiss Institute for Contemporary Art, NY.  Tajima also produces work and performs with the collaborative group New Humans, with Howie Chen.