Hill Art Foundation
May 3rd, 2024 — July 26th, 2024
Through her work, Mika Tajima makes us aware of the invisible structures of communal existence through our ever-evolving relationship with technology and the built environment. The title of this exhibition, Super Natural, draws on the notion of an order of existence that exceeds the laws of nature and stretches beyond the observable universe. Inside the cultural economies of heightened technological efficiency and optimization, the boundaries between our authentic and digital identities have become blurred to the point of unrecognizability. Our individual and communal agencies, which so often are vulnerable and contingent, are subjects of deep inquiry as transitory agents at the threshold between familiarity and otherness.
Super Natural presents a selection of Tajima’s latest bodies of work, from her Negative Entropy textiles to her Pranayama monoliths, Anima and Mirror blown glass sculptures, Ulterior air-jet wallpaper, and Art d’Ameublement thermoformed paintings. Together these works integrate ancient practices with electromagnetic energy to penetrate the psyche as well as control, regulate, and augment one’s mental state through the body. According to the artist, “Under the regime of techno-capitalism, we are the subject of contactless forces from within and beyond. In my practice, I’m transmediating between the invisible and the material to represent and understand the agency of being uncontainable, unreachable, and not yet knowable.”
Tajima visualizes the various states in which we hover among the many relational spaces outside ourselves. The exhibition interrogates the location of agency in our somatic experience of the world, which is increasingly abounding in artificial intelligence, by reminding us that life still has physicality through the invisible and the unknowable.
—Mika Yoshitake, curator
