NYAB Event - Midori Harima "Negativescape"

Midori Harima "Negativescape"

Honey Space

This event has ended.

Honey Space presents NEGATIVESCAPE, a new installation by Midori Harima. NEGATIVESCAPE is Harima's second solo exhibition in New York, and her first major installation environment created in this city.
Midori Harima's installations are rooted in a complicated inquiry and coming to terms with our contemporary, mediated experience of reality, and the frequent disconnect in our culture between surface information and inherent structure. Harima's work stems from her formative experience of growing up in post-WWII Japan, where the influences of American democracy, industry and popular culture helped shape a cultural condition that resembled neither traditional Japanese culture or values, nor the original Western sources. Harima's work reflects this unrootedness, while expressing both a lost innocence and longing for authenticity. Harima's work has been distinguished by her singular technique of using black and white photocopies of found imagery, from which she has created hollow, three-dimensional forms that, from a situation of absence and disconnect, seek to reconstitute an authentic presence.
For her installation at Honey Space, Harima embarks on new territory in her work, inverting her normal working process. Whereas her previous work was built from the foundational structure up to the surface, to the point where the surface information hid and obscured the hollow foundation, she has, for NEGATIVESCAPE, built a structure and foundation to meet a projected image. It is in that meeting of image and form that the final piece is created, and yet there remains a disconnect- as a viewer approaches the piece to inspect its detail, their own shadow intervenes and disrupts the illusion. Harima's chosen image- a merry-go-round- draws attention both to the inadequate nature of mediated reality- as a circular, moving form, a merry-go-round can only be distorted and incomplete in representation- as well as the complex experience of lost innocence that is central to so much of Harima's work.