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BOXES beyond borders

Category: Transparent

Nest

My grandmother gave me a necklace with a mustard seed enclosed in plastic when I was a young girl. She told me about faith. Having faith in God, in life, in myself, and if I had faith the size of a mustard seed I would be all right. I remember her often, especially during hard times, when it is so hard to have faith; but, maybe, faith only has to be the size of a mustard seed.

The mustard seed is enclosed in resin, in a nest of words, from an old sacred book of poems about love and life, sitting on a spring…waiting.

Untitled

Geometry:  To measure or survey the earth. A branch of mathematics that deals with the measurement, properties and relationships of points, lines, angles, surfaces and solids.

I decided that from these definition, to figuratively talk about the emptiness and its outer limits. The possibilities of connection and/or communication therein. Self-confinement and solitude. Intolerance.

My work is a product of my constant preoccupation about the quality of our lives. A continuous analysis and search of confrontation – questioning.

Therefore, in my work one should be able to see the structure, shape, feel the materials, and most importantly, the reason behind it.

A work that occupies at the same time a space and another more subjective one.

The analysis should not stop at the level of the elements that constitute my work, but should further try to see, or feel what links keep it together.

Those links give the various elements their true meaning, their reason to be and why they occupy such space in that order… and how they change in the mind of the viewer, thus becoming a silent accomplice of the artist.

Untitled

Geometry:  To measure or survey the earth. A branch of mathematics that deals with the measurement, properties and relationships of points, lines, angles, surfaces and solids.

I decided that from these definition, to figuratively talk about the emptiness and its outer limits. The possibilities of connection and/or communication therein. Self-confinement and solitude. Intolerance.

My work is a product of my constant preoccupation about the quality of our lives. A continuous analysis and search of confrontation – questioning.

Therefore, in my work one should be able to see the structure, shape, feel the materials, and most importantly, the reason behind it.

A work that occupies at the same time a space and another more subjective one.

The analysis should not stop at the level of the elements that constitute my work, but should further try to see, or feel what links keep it together.

Those links give the various elements their true meaning, their reason to be and why they occupy such space in that order… and how they change in the mind of the viewer, thus becoming a silent accomplice of the artist.

Map-Labyrinth

I opened the box’s door, I took off its top and I glued it to the bottom part to be a pedestal.  Then I painted the whole box in white and sealed it, following its shape with pieces of Plexiglas, on which appear (through the method of décollage that I have been using since 1974) fragmented images which constitute my labyrinths.  By this symbolic gesture of encasement and transparency, I hide away forever and protect the most precious feeling that remains buried at the bottom of this box since the time of Pandora;  Hope.

The Encrypted Future

Tajima Box Project. An artist and an extraordinary woman collaborate to create a box.

PHYLLIS CAMBPBELL, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF THE SEATTLE FOUNDATION

Right angles are only made by human beings. And if one thinks of the ultimate object created, one is led to the computer and its binary innards.

The dots on the unpainted, rectangular box are like the zeroes and ones used to create software. The disks represent programs which have strategies for solving problems of all dimensions, from local to global levels.

The box is about hope in the computer, that it will be able to help humanity.

 

 

Nancy’s Hope

Tajima Box Project. An artist and an extraordinary woman collaborate to create a box.

NANCY SODERBERG, FORMER SENIOR FOREIGN POLICY ADVISOR TO CLINTON, FORMER US AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS

My impression of Nancy is a study in contrasts: powerful authority figure/pretty, blonde hair, soft features. Woman, wife, stepmother/facing the horror of war on a daily basis.

But a singular vision: the world can change, war can be contained.

So, we have a soft, hand-stitched pillow – symbol of domesticity, a womanly art. In the colors of the UN flag, the ultimate multilateral institution, and round, like the diplomatic Round Table. A locked, but fragile glass box, its contents a weapon of powerful but intimate destruction: an M67 Fragmentation hand grenade. And the key tucked safely away in a pocket of the UN pillow.

Surely Goodness…

This box has many references. One is biblical. “My cup runneth over” directly precedes my title from the 23rd Psalm, a thought that came to mind as I made it. It is also something like Pandora’s Box.

The surely goodness part is the outcome of both references that I mean and want for women. It is who we are and how we create and effect culture. This box stands over and beyond patriarchy.

It is also part of an ongoing project of mine to recycle into art all the many art materials I have been carrying with me for nearly 35 years with the fantasy: Someday I will make some crayon drawings again, or use this glitter in a piece! Now I am doing it as pure art materials, recycling as all things do back into life.

I-Eye

I/Eye is one destination of a journey, the result of dialogues with a group of close friends and family. It is a fluid look-see at the emotional, intellectual and artistic issues of life; equally, a way of looking at my art and myself. I saw the box as very personal, as the baggage or the tools, both good and bad, given to me, with which to live this life. I have set this box within a fence that is open and yet enclosed, transparent, yet opaque. It marks personal boundaries. On this fence are the eyes of friends and family sketched as we talked. Their presence is about seeing eye-to-eye, or not, having them to look out for me, helping me to look at myself with creative eyes. The box was always meant to be the most transmutable part of my project, it did change, move and let itself be affected by this interactive process. Its final form, then, is one that signifies growth – a sort of literal ‘breaking out of the box’ to explore one’s potential, whatever that may be, wherever that may lead.

 

Life Beyond the Box

A heart that is closed within myself…
Fostered by the many changes of my life
What is Life Beyond the Box?
Nothing but a complicated colorful world.

The wooden box has been left to its original color to represent the simple me. The colorful nylon lines are communication lines between my community and me. The intensity of the lines on each side of the box symbolizes the importance of the communication level. Phrases have been inscribed onto the acrylic panels to reflect the views of Life.

Untitled

You may read and see,

But you can’t touch her.

You may look and sympathize,

But you can’t feel her pain.

You may think the wound is healed,

But you don’t know it stays forever.

She trusts to be loved and guarded,

And in return she got that.

She isolates herself from you

As her world is dark and lonely.

She is suffering behind that smile,

You don’t even realize it.

She is unable to accept the truth,

As it hurts to talk about it.

Listen now… “Why me!

I trusted him and this is the time when he RAPED me”

A Strange Tricky Game

The little showcase represents nothing unusual in connection to museum life if it were not for the object on display missing. One becomes aware of many suggestions and clues on the object concerned.

Simple tape markings on the bottom of the case and the glass say: FRONT, BACK, ANOTHER, ONE. The signs are to be read from the inside, not from the outside, thus we can read the direction from the side from which we are just looking out the showcase. The rest of the directions remains to be read backwards. To imagine to be in the case does not stop irritation, because the pane says FRONT is not opposite of the one which says BACK. It is impossible to relate ONE-ANOTHER- BACK AND FRONT to a single central point. Wherever one is standing, in reality or in imagination, we are bound to arrange these terms in a systematic order related to the surrounding space.

This space has to be considered not only around the vanished object, that is, the inside of the showcase, but also the space all around the showcase.

A Strange Tricky Game: contradictory and meaningful.

Bluebeard’s New Room

Continuation of the Bluebeard Legend:

In a crystal-clear night in February 1996, Bluebeard suddenly appeared in front of me and asked me to design for him a new and secret room which would no longer bring a woman misfortune, but would fan the flames of her yearning. I nodded assent and immediately started working. I built a blue-shimmering space out of mirrors and semi-translucent walls with numerous peepholes. Deep inside I enclosed my secret. I nailed tight the transparent entrance doors. In the pale light of morning, Bluebeard returns. In his curiosity he bent over the little box, — and then he dissolved in blue smoke. [Bluebeard’s Redemption]

Personal Newspapers

Personal newspapers published 25 February 1998, is the only copy of this issue. By the time you see it, it will probably be old, illustrating how precious or meaningless yesterday’s news is.

Newspapers are like no other object in the world varying from necessity to inflation.

They are part of my project “The Exhibition of the local newspapers, 1994 – 1998”, which consists of indoor and outdoor exhibitions, and includes several authorial newspapers, created throughout Europe and the U.S.

Newspapers have always been only local, (authentic languages and interpretations), only their consequences can be interpreted globally.

Untitled

I find this concept very challenging although of course initially, I found the concept of Women Beyond Borders and the form (BOX) contradictory, as boxes inherently are about discreet entities/objects with their own definite boundaries, surfaces and edges etc. And these boundaries are walls in themselves, not just an imaginary line or flat paths on the soil dividing countries nor printed lines on the map. In other words, the whole notion of borders and liberating women from it contradicts the very form of the box given to every participant that say so disturbingly otherwise. My intention for the approach to producing a work for this project is to deal with this collision of concept and form. I have gathered a few women and men from the community I am with, to witness a cremation of this box, after which the ashes would be placed in a custom made replica of the box but it will be in cut glass. Death to borders–of course the glass box and its glass walls is practically a vitrine – to enshrine the diminishing of all borders that divide us.