Taro Hattori, V2 (2009), Corrugated cardboard

Taro Hattori, V2 (2009), Corrugated cardboard

Swarm Gallery presents "V", a solo exhibition of new work by Oakland-based artist Taro Hattori.

Taro's art practice is a way of measuring distances between him and things he finds unacceptable. Dealing with these "unacceptable" elements - generally weapons of destruction - he attempts to define himself by examining what he hates. He integrates these ideas into his art-making to render his world more coherent and balanced. This is his search for order, which is so often vulnerable to the power of chaos in our society.

"V" consists of corrugated cardboard sculptures that represent five parts of a life-sized V-2 rocket, the world's first ballistic missile used by the Nazis. Other work in the show includes light-box prints that make a metaphorical connection between the V-2 rocket and Hattori's personal history.

The V-2 was the most inefficient weapon ever made, causing more deaths during its production than in its deployment. An estimated 20,000 inmates at Mittelbau-Dora died constructing 5200 V-2s. Deployment resulted in the deaths of an estimated 7250 civilians and military personnel. By constructing this rocket from material we find in our everyday lives, Taro attempts to deactivate this symbol of destructive power.

Taro Hattori, Various light boxes, installation (2009), Archival pigment print, acrylic, wood, fluorescent light

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Side gallery + project space | Living Room
Jordan Essoe

Jordan Essoe, Myth of Sisyphus (2009), Video still

Essoe presents a two-part installation in Swarm's project space and side gallery about the indifference of the universe and its facility as a container. In the side gallery, the video The Myth of Sisyphus shows the artist continuously vacuuming up and down a hillside. This room also includes two close-up photographs of the floor and ceiling of Essoe's home studio/family room/dining room. In the project space, a series of drawings depict the artist laying on, straddling, and playing around a closed chest. A rectangular sculpture set in front of these pictures suggests the unseen contents of the chest, but also perhaps Sisyphus's rock, or the contents of the world being sucked up and collected in the performance video.

Please scroll down to read expanded essay by the artist.

Jordan Essoe, Living Room (2009), One-part installation view

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LIMITED EDITION PRINTS

Living Room project statement - Jordan Essoe

Living Room is about containers; containers whose margins around the individual isolate him/her from the external world. Using the physical suburban home environment as a point of symbolic departure, the works in this project play with the idea of a personalized, psychological space that serves as a confining experiential shell, and solicit these questions from the viewer: what is the nature of such a psychological envelope, how is it separate from the self, and can it be conceived of as an independent, determinable object unto itself?

My concept for the Living Room project can likely trace its origins back to the impact made on me as a child by an article John Berger wrote about Giacometti in 1966, the year that the artist died (collected in Berger's book About Looking). In contemplating Giacometti's poverty and ascetic seclusion, Berger developed the metaphor of referring to Giacometti as having been born into a sack - a kind of motherless womb - which he terminally existed alone within. Whoever Giacometti loved was invited, wrote Berger, merely to share in the unbreakable isolation. Berger furthermore described contact as communicated "only through the thicknesses of two sacks." The suggestion that this numb attempt at connection might be the most acute form of intimacy possible between any pair or group of people - a simple rubbing of packaging - has always resonated with me and haunted me.

I wanted to recognize that a psychological container was common to every one of us, and that it informed the self and defined our relationship to the world. I would conceive of this internal/external living space as consisting neither of the world we inhabited nor of ourselves, but of the interaction between the two, its form dictated in equal parts by the individual that posits it and the world that anchors it, while remaining foreign to both. I thought of it as a tightly packed buffer zone between the subject and an external world encountered only through its membranes. Such an encapsulated, claustrophobic apparatus would have to be constructed of tissues made of the experience of experience, including sensation, comprehension, desire, expectation, as well as a continuum of circumstance including the past, the present, and the anticipation of the future. In a constant state of reinvention, addition, and subtraction, the 'living room' is always in medias res.

Metaphorically comparing this psychological living space to a physical domestic living space, I used my own dining room as the site/source material for many of the artworks in the project. This room is peculiar. My wife and I converted it from a family room into a dining room because of its proximity to the kitchen, but we rarely use it for dining, and while it has a formal dining room table and chairs, it has a ceiling fan where a chandelier traditionally should be. Because it is both open and centrally located in the house, I usually choose to work there instead of in my studio. This makes the room a very informal and intimate space in which I spend most of my time entirely alone. In essence, it functions as a living room.

In the Living Room exhibition, three black and white photographs in the first gallery - Floor, Ceiling, and Untitled (Zip) - map the container of my dining room in an effort to emphasize its boundaries and thresholds. A row of small, empty charcoal-colored pots installed below two of the photographs rehearse the concept of a container. Titled Fugue, the pottery was moved directly from the dining room into the gallery as a direct fragment of the staged living environment. A partial stripe of glossy black tape on the opposite wall is, in one aspect, an homage to a decorative chair rail, but it functions symbolically as a boundary or horizon line, demarcating the break between finite and infinite space. It is made of fetish bondage tape.

Displayed on a television below one strip of tape is The Myth of Sisyphus, a video work named for the essay by Albert Camus of the same title. This video documents a lengthy performance that features me vacuuming the hillside behind my house, outside my dining room window. Slightly slowed, it takes a little over 50 minutes for me to move up the hill and back down again, vacuuming the landscape, before it loops. I'm typically interested in slow motion and repetition in my video work because of the way that it emphasizes the corpuscular structure of things and the hidden anatomy that reveals itself only through meticulous or repeated viewing. The vacuuming itself also has its own fractal-like structure, repetitions within repetitions, moving up and down the hillside in endless loop, but also the physical motion of vacuuming itself as a back and forth repetitious motion with a mirror-like structure. The symbolic language of the performance contains a duality of a harvesting and a disposing of simultaneously. It is gleaning, but it is also an act of elimination. It is an exercise in curiosity and hunger, but equally an attempt at the sanitization and domestication of the world.

The Living Room project grapples with ideas of existential freedom in the Sartrian sense of facticity (in my terms, the container), and transcendence. In the essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus considers the repetitiveness of life, the foreign and alien world that is entirely indifferent to the needs of the individual, and the futility of life in the face of certain death. According to Camus, we are all the condemned man, and he reimagines the mythological story of Sisyphus to illustrate how liberation from life's puzzle is achieved by fully engaging existence instead of fixating on the compulsory submissions it entails. With similar sentiment, Sartre said "I choose within my situation, but I do not choose it." In my video, the vacuum takes the place of Sisyphus's rock, and the harvested detritus from the environment becomes the fissile material with which one involuntarily and perpetually renews their private 'living room.'

In the video, the entire performance with the vacuum is seen through a view fence, and the crossing vertical and horizontal wires of the fence subdivide and compartmentalize the landscape that the figure is moving through. One effect of this is that the figure appears to occupy one container after another as he moves up and down and across the hillside. The other important effect of the fence is that it creates an explicit visual suggestion of imprisonment, insisting that the isolation of the individual carries with it a sense of intense captivity. This theme of imprisonment is echoed throughout the exhibition in multiple ways, the most obvious of which is the repeated presence of shadow bands. These incidental shadows occur in my dining room in the afternoon, caused by the slats of the arbor outside the window, and make it appear as if there are bars on the window. The composition of the photograph Floor, a close-up of the carpet in my dining room, imitates the framing of The Myth of Sisyphus video, with the curvilinear pattern of the carpet suggesting the hillside and a set of vertical shadows set across it mimicking the lines of the fence. Shadow banding is absent from Ceiling, which is a close-up photograph of the ceiling fan, but it recurs in Untitled (Zip), which is a close-up photograph of the textured wall surface in between two shadows - the space between the bars, per se. This image's title nods to Barnett Newman, who thought of his massive abstract lines as unifying the fields on either side, not dividing them.

The exhibition finishes in a second, smaller room. The two rooms of the exhibition, in a sense, act out a convention of Victorian domestic zoning that all homes should have at least two entertainment rooms - one larger and more formal space for hosting company (a drawing room), and more humble and comfortable room intended exclusively for family use (a living or family room). The compartmentalized architecture of the gallery in this way particularly echoes the project's interest in containers.

The works in the second gallery have a more explicit use of symbolic language, and are of a slightly less documentary nature. The works are also more hand-made, and unique, non-editioned objects. The room itself is an uncomplicated rectangle, and the installation style utilized is more simple and even than that designed for the first gallery. There are two drawings, Chest 1 and Chest 2, hung on either side of the corner opposite the doorway, and a large rectilinear sculpture is installed on the floor to their left, titled Rock. At the height of a typical domestic chair rail (about three feet up from the floor), the black tape from the previous gallery recurs, encircling the entire room. Interrupting a short passage of this tape, above the sculpture, is Untitled (Zip 2), a small square wall drawing executed directly in line with the proportions of the tape's established horizon line.

The drawings Chest 1 and Chest 2 document a performance of my body interacting with a closed chest. It is an exposition of the idea that the psychological container surrounding the individual can be independently objectified - in other words, it can be thought of and depicted as a distinctly separate object, one to which we are inextricably bound. The chest serves symbolically in the drawings as this objectified psychological space, and the performance of the body with it expresses the relationship of the Cartesian self to its container. The shadow bands are there, laying across the figure and chest, dressing the otherwise nearly nude body. Their lines become a prison garb.

The sculpture Rock measures the exact dimensions of the interior cavity of the chest in the drawings. It is an idea of a space of contents as a solidified impossibility, almost as if one were trying to peer into someone else's psychological space and meeting this great opacity instead - or encountering the impossibility of wanting to reveal or share your psychological space to someone else. The sculpture has a finish analogous with the spray-on suburban wall texture depicted in Untitled (Zip). I've grown to love the way that this cheap texture pays homage to some kind of earthen surface. Upon willing inspection, it becomes a poetically infinite, surreal landscape. The wall drawing Untitled (Zip 2), made directly above the sculpture, renders this same texture again. The break in the black tape that allows room for the wall drawing lines up with a gap in the plexiglass base upon which the Rock sculpture sits. This suggested path is meant to imply the Sisyphean journey of the self within its 'living room,' and how it meets - and attempts to permeate - the horizon before it drops away from it again.