Takahashi is a gardener of junk. With the utmost patience she tenderly weeds through a crazy jumble of found objects -- clocks, hammers, old paint buckets, scraps of paper, electric fans -- and arranges them in a most fastidious manner. While...
[more]Takahashi is a gardener of junk. With the utmost patience she tenderly weeds through a crazy jumble of found objects -- clocks, hammers, old paint buckets, scraps of paper, electric fans -- and arranges them in a most fastidious manner. While her installations look like the scene of an accident or a ransacked crime zone, with a broken mirror here, pages from a calendar there, and miscellany strewn everywhere, there is also an uncanny order to the din. And din it is, for the scenes are accompanied by a clatter of sounds -- ticking, buzzing, banging, flashing.
Part of her intrigue is that she actually lives in the space she is creating, sleeping on an army cot in the middle of things in order to stay as attached to the work as possible. Perhaps it's this supreme level of involvement that won her the attention of Charles Saatchi; in 1999, the Saatchi Gallery included her in its "Neurotic Realism" show.
Like all her works, the installations "Clockwork at Hales"(1998) and "Info Only" (1998) are a combination of restraint and chaos. In "Clockwork," it's as if a tornado had blown through the workspace, followed by some pixies, who pranced through and placed things just so. Takahashi invites us to stare without shame at the innards of her life, examine the pandemonium, and try to make sense of it.
"I don't make drawings beforehand," she explains. "There's always a kind of story. I set up a background and start imagining things. Everything has its own life and I want to make things more themselves, to liberate them from imposed rules. Teetering on the edge between order and chaos, that's the exciting point -- living is like that."
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