Mika Tajima’s Multi-Sensory Art Centers Humanity in the Torrent of Technology | Artsy

Once a week, Mika Tajima heads to his current show in rhythm gallery in New York with a bouquet of fresh flowers. She enters Chelsea's downstairs gallery and replaces the dying flowers on his sculpture. naturalists (2024). The piece features a geometric vase, placed on a pedestal, filled with botanical elements, all under fluorescent lighting. Over the course of the week, the flowers bake under the light, absorb ultraviolet radiation, and gradually begin to emit a strange blue glow. Tajima's floral routine is more than just maintenance; It is a symbolic gesture towards the cycles of decay and rebirth. The flowers, radiant with light but at the same time wilting, are reminders to viewers of the transience of life.

“This ritual is a cornerstone of the Tajima show.”Energetic”, available at Pace until February 24. The solo exhibition, the artist's first in New York City in eight years, is named after the study of energy and its transformations. Tajima's latest research is developed through 13 works that contemplate the delicate balance of life in the midst of the incessant advance of technological progress.

Upon entering the gallery, visitors are enveloped by the aromas of eucalyptus and mint, a fragrance released by Vipassana (2024), a black pyramid-shaped sculpture on a pedestal with a hidden vaporizer. Through aroma, Tajima aims to make guests become, in his words, “suddenly very aware” of their surroundings and bring them to the present moment.

In this state of intensified sensation, viewers encounter three colossal textile works. Part of Tajima's “Negative Entropy” series, these framed abstract textiles have a painterly quality from afar and exude a fascinating energy due to their scale and the stark color contrast of their broad gradients. Up close, the intricately woven threads emerge. As Vipassana, these works involve the senses, although in this case, Tajima has visualized sound waves. To make these enormous textiles, the Brooklyn-based artist translated audio into spectrograms (visual representations of sound frequency) and then sent the result to a textile factory in the Netherlands, where they were woven on a digital jacquard loom.

"I'm playing with a tension between materiality and immateriality," Tajima said in an interview at the gallery. “Even though things are so digitized, they are still literal. We literally still have our bodies, textiles, tactile things and tangible things, so weaving something resembling sound became a perfect expression of that. It is materializing something that is ephemeral and fleeting… But like any type of portrait or painting, it is just the essence of something. It is not complete".

For previous works in the “Negative Entropy” series, Tajima used field recordings taken at his former home in Philadelphia. This new work uses auditory brainwave data, collected through a collaboration with neurosurgeons who use electrostimulation in a procedure to repair brain function. Using audio of the procedure provided by neurosurgeons, Tajima created spectrograms, digitally assigning a color to each frequency. She monumentalizes these flashes of individual consciousness, blown up to enormous proportions, to represent infinitesimal and fleeting moments of existence. Through this use of scale, Tajima is able to “play with this feeling of the individual among the masses.”

He also uses scale to great effect with sculpture. Sensory object (January 1, 2023, United States) (2024), the heart of the exhibition, in which he compares the relatively short life of digital technology with the immensity of geological time. The sculpture consists of a large rose quartz stone placed in a display case, adorned with a small circular piece of glass. The crystal is a 5D memory crystal, an experimental piece of nanotechnology known colloquially as a “Superman memory crystal,” which stores every post published on Twitter (now X) on January 1, 2023. The enormous amount of data is a representation of our collective digital footprint, compressed into a single object.

sensory object It appears in “Energetics” along with three other rose quartz monoliths, part of Tajima’s “Pranayama” series, named after the Indian breathing ritual. Tajima chose to incorporate rose quartz both in reference to New Age spiritual practices and for its piezoelectric qualities, or its ability to generate an electrical charge. Specifically, he highlights how it is used to power clocks. “Sometimes it seems like time goes by so quickly, if you think about digital technology and what's happening with it,” he said. “But then here is a clock: the crystal that has been keeping time for millions of years since it was formed…. There are all these temporalities in the show that help place the viewer and myself within this timeline of infinity.”

Tajima's enormous sculptures, stand-ins for human figures, also represent how people attempt to understand or control the body. The hollow rose quartz crystals are dimpled with brass jacuzzi jets, allowing viewers to see directly through the stones. The placement of these piercings is based on acupuncture pressure point diagrams.

"If capitalism and technology are constantly trying to harness our energy... many of these techniques, both ancient and modern, are co-opted by capitalism to serve something else," Tajima explained, citing the corporatization of spiritual practices such as meditation as a technique to improve productivity. "There are all these things that are in tension with each other because, of course, meditation apparently is really for the individual."