Taiko Chandler
Taiko Chandler: From the Etching Press
15th Street Gallery
1708 15th Street, Boulder, CO 80302
November 7-December 28, 2019
Admission: Free
Taiko Chandler: Haptic Visions
Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA), Present Box
1750 13th Street, Boulder, CO 80302
Curated by Yasmeen M. Siddiqui
October 24-November 10, 2019
Admission: $2
Review by Rose van Mierlo
“I am rooted but I flow.”
Virginia Woolf
When viewing Taiko Chandler’s site-specific installation Haptic Visions at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, there is a moment when the fragile organza and paper structure seems to move with a semblance of ebb and flow; momentarily becoming more than an assemblage of materials and shapes. In that moment, the work embraces a conceptual power that almost suspends its physicality. Chandler’s two solo exhibitions, From the Etching Press—a multi-work survey of recent printmaking and installation work at the 15th Street Gallery—and Haptic Visions, reveal a practice in flux, which moves between critical engagement on the one hand, and the immediate realities of form on the other.
On the left: Taiko Chandler, Untitled, monotype print with carborundum. On the right: part of Chandler’s Untitled Installation #1, hand-cut monotypes on Tyvek. Both are on view at 15th Street Gallery as part of the exhibition Taiko Chandler: From the Etching Press. Image by DARIA.
Taiko Chandler, Haptic Visions, 2019, organza and hand-cut monotypes on Tyvek. Image by Wes Magyar courtesy of BMoCA.
Denver-based Chandler was born and raised in Nagano, Japan. Originally trained as a nurse, Chandler’s art practice is prolific and varied. Spanning craft, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, the artist’s work is motivated by her own history of immigration, combined with an interest in temporality and the natural world. Often working with fabric or drawing in a thread-like manner, her methods resemble that of the seamstress.
In mythology and literature, the seamstress is often a storyteller, weaving together strands of narrative into plot. In Norse mythology, the Norns are female beings that weave the fates of gods and men, represented as silver threads. These threads, simultaneously fragile and strong as steel, represent the tension between the powerful immediacy of life as we experience it and its unpredictable frailty. Similarly, Chandler plays with a tension between presence and precarity, “stitching” together fragile forms into a monumental whole.
Taiko Chandler, Untitled Installation #2, hand-cut monotypes on Tyvek. On view at 15th Street Gallery as part of the exhibition Taiko Chandler: From the Etching Press. Image by DARIA.
Installation view of Taiko Chandler: From the Etching Press, including from the left: On and On, monoprint with stencils, Untitled, monotype print with carborundum, and Frozen, hand-cut monotypes on Tyvek. Image by DARIA.
Taiko Chandler: From the Etching Press, at 15th Street Gallery, succeeds in presenting Chandler’s breath of skills as an artist. At the same time, it prioritizes showcasing the artist’s technical versatility and prowess over the engagement with larger histories of art, craft, and diaspora, raising questions that the exhibition does not fully address. How does the artist contextualize herself and her diasporic reality within a global debate on belonging? What does it mean to be a citizen of multiple places at once? How can we think of translation in terms of exchange, as it relates to memory, culture, and (visual) language? What else is being stitched together, and what is the potential of this methodology?
Haptic Visions, at BMoCA, curated by director of Minerva Projects Yasmeen Siddiqui, focuses on Chandler’s critical engagement with method and meaning. There is an investment here in disrupting the politics of duality that underlie so many discourses on migration. Instead, Haptic Visions attempts to move Chandler’s practice away from identifications with oppositions, to embrace the sense of wholeness that her methods of stitching indicate. [1] In more descriptive terms, the work no longer differentiates between paper and fabric materials, or wall-based versus sculptural form, but rather presents a jumbled wholeness as a metaphor for the inextricability of the body, history, and identity. This step towards monumental spatiality, at the same time, makes a claim on the audience’s bodily and sensory participation while reducing the distance between viewer and object.
As indicated by the title, Chandler is invested in moving our experience from the visual to the haptic (tactile) properties of the work, which attempts to do away with the formal distance prescribed by the proper, historic divisions between subject and object. In the words of Laura U. Marks, a haptic approach to art indicates a relationship in which
“our self rushes up to the surface to interact with another surface. When this happens there is a concomitant loss of depth—we become amoebalike, lacking a center, changing as the surface to which we cling changes. We cannot help but be changed in the process of interacting.”[2]
Similarly, Haptic Visions attempts to break down the limits between materials, histories, and space. Politically, too, the work can be read as a move away from a subject position defined by distance: it absolves the immigrant from the obligatory identification with painful rupture; of being torn away from the land of origin, while never fully belonging to the new place.
Taiko Chandler, Haptic Visions, organza and hand-cut monotypes on Tyvek. Image by Wes Magyar courtesy of BMoCA.
Haptic Visions works towards a union of both realities. It expresses the beginnings of a desire to embrace an ethics of translocalism: the state of belonging to several places at once. Yet the tension that the work derives from a latent threat of spilling over, engulfing, and losing oneself, expressed in the material set-up as well as the title, remains just beyond reach.
Rose van Mierlo is a curator and critic specializing in post-1970 visual art, with a focus on feminist art practice. Cross-stitching critical theory with close visual analysis and lyric voice, her writing takes risks when it comes to form, genre, and methodologies. Her essays, reviews, and short stories have appeared internationally, including in thisistomorrow, nY, Entropy, Sluice__, and Flash: The International Short Short Story Magazine. After graduating from AKV/St. Joost Art College in the Netherlands with a prize winning collection of short stories, she was appointed as a critical writing fellow at the art institute Lokaal 01 in Belgium in 2010, and a postgraduate fellow at DNA/GEMAK in the Netherlands in 2011. She holds an MA degree in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London, U.K., 2015, and is a director of the international SquareWorks:Lab artist fellowship.
[1] Siddiqui asserts in the Haptic Visions Gallery Guide available to visitors at BMoCA: “The legibility of Chandler’s installation in a museum’s project space and gift shop relies on our responding to the work viscerally, at the same time drawing on iconic art historical references from imagery exported from Japan to Europe and beyond. I can’t help but to think of Katsushika Hokusai’s wood block print The Underwave of Kanagawa (1829/1930) that papers college dorm rooms and t-shirts, and has inspired countless artists.”
[2] Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 16.
