Innovative in her approach, Mika Tajima combines painting, sculpture, design, performance, video and sound to create immersive installations that integrate these disciplines and in turn expanding the parameters of our experiences with each medium. For instance, her paintings are often hybrid objects that double as fine art object and stage prop. For her ambitious SAM Next exhibition, Tajima has envisioned a dynamic, architectural installation that explores the structure and language of painting as well as complicates the institutional history of displaying objects in a gallery. A video projection, a painting rack, double-sided paintings on wheels, and freestanding lamps, alongside wall-mounted paintings are brought together in an installation that will begin to burst at the seams.
A graduate of the New Genres MFA Program at New York’s Columbia University, Tajima’s interdisciplinary practice embraces a wide-range of influence, including critiques of modernism and its failures, the legacy of minimalism, as well as modernist architecture, including the modular structures of Herman Miller’s Action Office designs of the late 1960s. Often working collaboratively, the artist has worked on projects with Vito Acconci, Charles Atlas, Judith Butler, and the Brooklyn-based noise band, New Humans, of which she is a founding member. Tajima is the sixth artist selected for a solo exhibition in the SAM Next series, the Seattle Art Museum’s contemporary art exhibition program.
—Marisa C. Sánchez, Assistant Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art