Artist
Taro Hattori
Taro Hattori is an interdisciplinary installation artist originally from Tokyo, Japan, who currently lives in Richmond, CA. He has shown his installation work and socially engaged projects nationally and internationally, with residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Art Omi (New York), McColl Center for Visual Art (Charlotte), and Kuandu Museum of Fine Art (Taiwan). He has received grants and awards from Art Matters, the Zellerbach Foundation, California Humanities, the California Arts Council, the West Collection, and the Center for Cultural Innovation, and currently teaches at California College of the Arts. In both his sculptural and relational installations, he creates environments where viewers face a conflicting issue, a question to ponder, and an experience to grapple with — often starting a project with an uncomfortable question in which multiple elements coexist in a dissonant harmony. In recent years his research has focused on relating sculpture and human interaction, incorporating music and conversation as integral parts of the creative process.
About the Work
Treadling a Lost Journey by Taro Hattori transforms a vintage sewing machine into an instrument of memory and mourning. By modifying the mechanical action of the treadle, Hattori enables the machine to play back songs and melodies associated with personal loss. The rhythmic motion of sewing — historically associated with domestic labor and women's work — becomes an act of remembrance, each stitch a note in a melody of grief and longing. The work connects the tactile, repetitive nature of textile craft with the repetitive comfort of a lullaby, suggesting that both are forms of meditation on absence and presence.