Taro Hattori
Taro Hattori is an interdisciplinary installation artist originally from Tokyo, Japan and currently lives in Richmond, CA. Hattori has been showing his installation work and socially engaged projects nationally and internationally. He has been awarded residency from numerous places such as Headlands Center for the Arts; Art Omi, New York; McColl Center for Visual Art, Charlotte and Kuandu Museum of Fine Art, Taiwan. He also has received grants or awards from Art Matter, New York; the Zellerbach Foundation, California Humanities, California Arts Council, West Collection, Center for Cultural Innovation, etc.. His work has been represented by Swarm Gallery (Oakland), West Collection (Philadelphia), Black Square Gallery (Miami) and Peter Miller Gallery (Chicago). Hattori currently teaches at California College of the Arts.
Both in his sculptural and relational installations, he works to create an environment where viewers are faced with a conflicting issue, a question to ponder, and an experience to grapple with. He often starts his projects with an uncomfortable question in which multiple elements coexist in a dissonant harmony. In each installation, disjunction emerges between choices of materials, aesthetics, human actions and sociopolitical contexts. He uses this idea of conflict and harmony as a poetic transformation exploring human desire and relationships between vulnerability and destruction.
In these recent years, his research focuses on relating sculpture and human interaction, incorporating music or/and conversations as integral parts of the creative process. Through sculptural installation, he examines how our desire and power can lead to self-destructive tendencies. By placing my work in a setting that is open for interaction, these installations invite people to explore relational dynamics, consider conflict and resolution, and participate in a conversation with each other and the work. Music and conversations become tools for me to integrate complex relational dynamics.
Starting from Jacques Lacan’s idea of self being developed only by mirroring others, Rosalyn Deutsche wrote in her Evictions “Conflict, division, and instability, then, do not ruin the democratic public sphere; they are conditions of its existence.” Divided-self naturally preconditions divisiveness of our society. Wellbeing of society and individuals can be looked at as the process of integrating conflict with ourselves and others. His work addresses these issues. His practice is an effort to understand how dissonances and consonances constitute our society and himself.
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