Mika Tajima

This inaugural exhibition in the Spalter New Media Gallery features two works by Mika Tajima. Broken Plaid was recently acquired for the Museum’s permanent collection. Regarding this piece, Tajima states: “I wanted to create a space that was part sculpture, part lounge, part viewing area, part installation. Each aspect of the installation falls somewhere in between being purely functional or purely aesthetic.”Viewers are invited to touch, move, and sit on the pillows strewn about the gallery floor and to enjoy the lounge atmosphere of the transformed gallery space. Tajima’s interest in mixing different genres is also seen in her most recent video, Holding Your Breath (taking the long way). It was inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s quasi-documentary Sympathy for the Devil (1968), which depicts the Rolling Stones in their recording studio. The current video presents the artist, her band New Humans, and their collaborators experimenting with sound in a gallery space transformed into a fictive recording studio.

Please feel free to use the pillows.