September 10–October 29, 2016
Kayne Griffin Corcoran
1201 South La Brea Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90019
Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition with Jean-Pascal Flavien and Mika Tajima. While making very different work, both artists investigate social relationships to built environments and attempt to expose the affecting nature of these designed systems. The artists postulate in various forms such as architectural interventions or deconstructions of design objects, all in relation to the human subject.
This exhibition is centered around spaces of possibility that exceed ideological and functional determination and realized in hypothetical, metaphorical, and physical manifestations.
An ongoing subject in Mika Tajima’s practice is the examination of sites of production—such as work and factory environments—in relation to the contemporary imperative to produce oneself. The sculptures in the exhibition invoke this amorphous zone of productivity and recreation through two chair forms designed to produce social interaction: the collaborative office lounge chair and the communal hot tub.
The casualization of today’s workplace marked by relaxation lounges and connective desking relies on the formalization of collaborative social relationships. Tajima highlights the contradictions in this development by examining the coopted language of “public” and “social” within the corporate enclosure. The exhibition features a sculpture resembling the “Social Chair” form found in the Public Office Landscape furniture—a low casual bench design found in airports, etc. Tajima’s version is made from traditional walnut and perforated with hot tub jet nozzles.
The “Epimelesthai Sautou (Take Care)” series is comprised of cast acrylic hot tub sculptures that are reverse-spray enameled in saturated gradient colors. These hot tub objects are ergonomically molded to the human form, underlining how the body is articulated in relation to an object.
Tajima’s “Meridian” mood light sculpture series focuses on ambient techniques that shape our embodied experience of environments. The installation illuminates the exhibition space creating a visualization of distant sensing bodies. The color of the lights respond in real time to the aggregate sentiment scraped from Twitter of citizens in New Songdo City, a new master plan in South Korea, considered to be a template for urban futurity in which the entire environment is embedded with computational technologies that provide urban management and regulation.
Negative Entropy textile works are portraits of human mediators within the landscape of production. Each work is made from field recordings that are digitally transmuted into images and physically interpreted by a weaving designer to produce a Jacquard fabric. Passing through different processes and hands, these textiles are woven on an industrial Jacquard loom, considered a predecessor to mass automated technology and a prototype for computers.
Jean-Pascal Flavien’s practice is focused around the design and construction of houses, which in turn become platforms for other works. Thought out and designed as functional habitations, each house sets up a singular living situation. Although they are posed as characters, the houses are not to be understood as psychological beings but rather as conceptual entities, representing ideas, locations, and events in which the architectural conditions can determine the behavior of its inhabitants (and vice versa). Jean-Pascal Flavien’s work explores how architecture shapes our experience of space but also how it can fundamentally determine our experience of ourselves and of others.
Flavien will present his seventh constructed house and second version of statement house (temporary title) in the adjacent courtyard of the gallery, as well as hanging “plans” (cutout floorplans of the house). This house includes in its design elements that indicate its flexibility, such as a circular indentation in the floor marking where the bathroom could have been. The hanging “plans—each slight variations of the structure’s present configuration—as well as cutouts and truncated corners (geometrical remnants of these failed plans) are also present in the space. The statement house (temporary title) is tied to the ideas of language. The artist has invited two screenwriters to script the daily activities of the house, each on separate Twitter accounts. In the scripts, the house will shift between protagonist and sight of action.
Jean-Pascal Flavien lives and works in Berlin.
Mika Tajima lives and works in NY.
For press inquiries please email press [at] kaynegriffincorcoran.com
