2012 Exhibition
5. dolefullhouse
In Tabaimo’s dolefullHouse (2007, 6:21), the bright interior of an empty dollhouse undergoes a surreal transformation. Disembodied hands arrange bourgeois furnishings, piece by piece, until each room appears conventionally domestic. Yet all is not as it seems: as the intimate spaces of the home are made comfortable and orderly, the walls begin to pulsate under the pressure of a grim, unseen force lurking beneath the surface. The hands begin to frantically scratch themselves and then at the walls of house, exposing something wildly organic and bizarre. The film concludes as a leak grows into a disastrous flood and water bursts through the façade washing everything away so that the whole process may begin again. You are invited to enjoy Tabaimo’s vision, elegantly rendered and eerie displayed under the night sky at the Detroit Institute of Arts Loggia.
Artist Information
Tabaimo
Tabaimo was born in Hyogo, Japan in 1975. Tabaimo’s drawings and video installations probe the unsettling themes of isolation, contagion, and instability that seem to lurk beneath daily existence in contemporary Japan. She draws aesthetic inspiration for her animated videos from a combination of Japanese art forms—ukiyoe woodcuts, manga, and anime—while she often sets her layered, surrealistic narratives in domestic interiors TABAIMOand communal spaces such as public restrooms, commuter trains, and bathhouses. Tabaimo populates her work with uncanny characters that, either through mutation or as victims of inexplicable violence, become fragmented in their relationships to the environment and their own identity. Installed in theatrical, stage-like settings, her work is attuned to the architecture and the viewers within it. Tabaimo graduated from Kyoto University of Art and Design (1999). Her work has appeared in major exhibitions at the Venice Biennale (2011, 2007); Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, London (2010, 2007); Yokohama Museum of Art, Tokyo (2010); National Museum of Art, Osaka (2010); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2010); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007); Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2006); Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2006, 2003); Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2005); National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2004); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2003); and the São Paulo Bienal (2002). Tabaimo lives and works in Nagano, Japan.