Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s, In case my mind [betrays] me, let me say one last thing. curated by Anne-Laure Lemaitre marks Hatanaka’s first solo exhibition with Trotter&Sholer. This exhibition is an exploration of personal experience with bipolar disorder. Offering nuance, specifcity, and knowledge of the misunderstood condition, this exhibition highlights our often-tenuous grasping for stability and efforts to adapt to uncontrollable uncertainty.
The title of the exhibition, In case my mind [betrays] me, let me say one last thing., refers to a quote from writer Naomi Jackson, describing her own relationship to having bipolar. Jackson notes that she knows“just below these heights of creativity, there is a winding staircase that leads to mania.” She evokes the feverish urge to create, which comes with a deep understanding of the fragility of any one moment.
Materially, Hatanaka intentionally engages in processes rooted in generational relationships to lands. Lemaitre notes that Hatanaka’s practice of reciprocally learning for prolonged periods in places like Nunavut in the Canadian Arctic, Vietnam, and Japan, has allowed her to connect with the communities and ancestral practices of these places. Her time with seventh-generation papermakers in Japan has been a way of connecting to her personal heritage through her art, and the regional paper that she has used for 15 years, made from a process that dates back over a thousand years.
Hatanaka’s work explores the correlations between experiences of physical and mental health and the growing instability of our natural world. The materials she uses both require and contribute to a clean environment. These now outlying ways of making and being are deeply relevant to traditional knowledge. What we consider disabled ways of being are also outlying, yet important wisdom. The exhibition invites us to consider the value of the lived experiences that are often cast aside.
For this exhibition Hatanaka has created a site-specifc work, representative of her larger practice, that veils the gallery’s large windows. Its installation leaves partial views into the gallery space from the outside. She uses paper handmade in Japan and Southeast Asia alongside paper she herself handmakes, in combination with ink drawing, relief printmaking and gyotaku, the historical Japanese method of using fish and non-toxic ink to create prints. Using traditional techniques, she stitches the paper, with drawing and print elements, in this case to create a textile which embeds a graph of the increasing prevalence of the word “instability.” These works are both delicate and deceptively strong, perhaps a fitting metaphor for someone living with bipolar.
In case my mind [betrays] me, let me say one last thing. will be on view at 168 Suffolk Street from Nov. 7 through Dec. 14th.
