A detail of a work from Hiromi Takizawa's thesis show at Cal-State Fullerton in 2007. A similar Takizawa installation opens at Heller Gallery this week.
The pairing of glass and neon effects transcendence in Hiromi Takizawa’s new installation at Heller Gallery in Manhattan. Opening on October 30th, Crossing the Pacific Ocean addresses the artist’s sense of being dislocated from her family in Japan while at the same time connecting with others in the United States. The mediums of light and glass convey ephemerality, referencing the fragility of memories and the slipperiness of the present.
The installation incorporates a series of half-spherical, organic glass forms—which the artist calls “lenses”—and an airplane marked out in blue neon. Encased in a wooden frame and mounted on the gallery ceiling, the airplane sign is reflected in the surfaces of the glass forms, which are clustered in a roughly circular pattern on the gallery floor. Interestingly, Takizawa has flipped one of the lenses upside down, with the result that one of the airplane reverberations faces in the direction opposite from the rest.
The photograph above, which documents a similar work as it appeared in Takizawa’s 2007 thesis show at Cal-State Fullerton, demonstrates how the phenomenon works. If you look carefully at the image, you can see the tiny, lone airplane facing the opposite direction, near the left side of the frame. This airplane functions like an arrow pointing to the East, even as the predominant orientation of the fleet is toward the West (more conceptually than literally). You can also see the slats of the wooden floor beneath the glass “bubbles,” and note the way the neon inhabits them.
Hiromi Takizawa, Crossing the Pacific Ocean (Detail), 2009.
The neon is, at once, both hidden and omnipresent. As gallerist Katya Heller notes, viewers likely won’t notice the ceiling-mounted airplane form until they’ve entered the 20-by-20-foot room of the installation, but the bluish tinge of the reflecting glass should draw their eyes as soon as they’ve entered the gallery. Echoed on the curvaceous forms, the airplane, this signifier of excitement and change, becomes somehow less confident, distorted and hazy around the edges even as its vibrancy of light and color is multiplied.
A like-minded Takizawa work was also exhibited at UrbanGlass last summer. For that, the artist used similar glass lenses that she strung together like beads on a necklace, where the string became a sort of path (illuminated once again by the airplane sign) linking the artist with her identical twin sister in Japan. Nakizawa was also a 2008 MFA Awardee at UrbanGlass, which meant her work appeared in an exhibition of glass work from recent master’s degree recipients in January of that year.
Crossing the Pacific Ocean will be on display at Heller until November 28th. Though the installation officially opens on October 30th, the artist will be on hand for a special preview on October 29th from 6 to 9 PM. For visiting information, see the gallery’s website here.
–Analisa Coats Bacall