Kayne Griffin presents a solo exhibition by Mika Tajima titled “You Must Be Free,” featuring sculptures, paintings, and a large-scale haptic air installation. The exhibition will be open to the public to view through March 12, 2022.
From an early investigation into the regulatory and relational structures of human bodies in built environments, Tajima’s recent work extends her inquiry into the conditions of human agency and self-determinacy. This exhibition focuses on the necessity and impossibility of freedom in our contemporary moment. The title, “You Must Be Free,” appears as an external command to achieve freedom and produces a contradictory tension that reveals a social limit to its practice. The speech act presents freedom as a pressing desire and controlling demand on the subject, underlining the entwinement of control and freedom. The animating force of this paradoxical directive is manifested in this exhibition as air pressure and its circulation through contained and porous objects and architecture. Throughout “You Must Be Free,” air is exchanged, regulated, injected, and ventilated to produce a conditioned space for objects and bodies.
The Force Touch (Totum Corpus) installation features a central wall expanse perforated with air emitting jet nozzles arranged in acupoint patterns referring to the meridian system in the body and the vital energy thought to flow through channels connecting the skin to internal organs. Transposing a physiological map onto architecture, Force Touch (Totum Corpus) images a bodily system on the exhibition infrastructure and similarly connects an unseen interior to an exposed surface. Drawing on the exhibition as a sensorial space in Michael Asher’s early “air works” in which accelerated air was an invisible sculptural- architectural presence, Force Touch (Totum Corpus) escalates the source and material context of the air pressure introduced into the room. The forced air emitted from the wall structure is produced by a ventilation system designed to dissipate heat created by computer processors in order to maintain high-performance levels. The air jets condition the space and produce a haptic pressure on the body that is prevalent in touch-less technology and virtual encounters.
On view: January 22, 2022 – March 12, 2022
What: “You Must Be Free,” Mika Tajima
Where: Kayne Griffin, 1201 S. La Brea Ave., LA, 90019
Phone: 310 586-6886
Website: https://www.kaynegriffin.com/
