Loring Taoka: ±



Loring Taoka's Artwork

June 11, 2022 - March 27, 2023
Crystal Bridges Musuem of American Art
Bentonville, Arkansas

What do you see when you look at this pattern? Do you recognize certain shapes? Do the colors evoke a memory? For artist Loring Taoka, designs like this operate in ambiguous and limitless spaces. They balance between chaos and control, sugar-sweet pastels that blend and crescendo into disorienting layers.

In ±, Taoka immerses a section of the Contemporary Art Gallery in such a pattern, inviting visitors to leave their expectations and comfort zones behind and fall into a space of illegibility. Walking down the hall, visitors can engage with the pattern through moments of optical disruption through the lenses of frosted glass, light boxes, gels, acrylics, and protrusions that pull the pattern off the wall and bring it into the memories, experiences, and personal references of the viewer.

The work itself speaks to the experiences of minoritized groups who often have to live in between cultures, classes, and gender expressions depending on their environment. As the artist says, “I think a lot about how I move through space and how I carry myself. I think constantly about who I am and how my existence inhabits an ambiguous state. Being a queer, Japanese-American has required me to be constantly engaged with perception and negotiation.”

± artist notes:

In ±, I used a handful of different materials and approaches to engage with the pattern/wallpaper—mirrored plexiglass, uv prints on plexiglass, transparent colored plexiglass, an empty metal frame as well as using engineering-grade reflective vinyl, drawing on the wallpaper, cutting into it, and placing printed transparent vinyl on top.

The wallpaper itself is mirrored in the gallery, taking the grid of the image and using that as a foundation. The mirrored plexiglass is a heavy-handed gesture at this idea, but doesn't mirror the image properly; it also pulls the viewer into the space itself and places their image into the work. The UV prints take the grid of the pattern and offset them in the space. Opposite of this is the negative space of the UV prints placed onto the wall in reflective vinyl. This vinyl only activates with a flash from a camera which was utilized to draw the viewer to the structure of the museum itself, thinking of "no flash photography" in particular while also thinking of what's hidden/revealed. The transparent plexiglass and transparent vinyl prints are made in RGB and CMYK, respectively, and were used to look at the making of an image in additive and subtractive color—thinking of the perception of color itself. The empty picture frame is hung with the middle at 60", again as a way to look at the standards of making and displaying art. Directly across from this is a line drawn on the wallpaper in sharpie at 60".