#papertrails

Left: Kyoko Hamaguchi, Postal Summary (9505 5143 5727 8320 1732 96), 2018, shipping box, photo emulsion Right: tamara suarez porras, as two bodies near in a field of stars, 2020, silver gelatin print

Paper Trails April 10  – May 9, 2021 The gallery will be open every Sat & Sun from 3 – 6pm and by appointment

Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York is pleased to present Paper Trails, a two-person exhibition curated by Yael Eban featuring the work of Kyoko Hamaguchi and tamara suarez porras. Both artists incorporate rigorous analog darkroom processes in unconventional and dynamic ways, resulting in photographic objects that are both visually striking and conceptually lyrical.

In “Postal Summary,” Kyoko Hamaguchi transforms the delivery system into a process for photographic image making. She gets a shipping box at a post office, makes a pinhole in one of its sides, coats the inside with photo emulsion so that its surface becomes photosensitive, and ships it to herself. While moving through the postal system, the box covertly records the shipment process on its photosensitive interior. Once Hamaguchi receives the box, she soaks it in chemicals to develop the image. During this process, the box becomes distressed and the shape distorted. The resulting image shows several spaces superimposed on top of each other, accentuated by the crisscrossing of fluorescent ceiling lights in a phenomenon akin to abstract painting. Each box produces a unique image dependent on where and for how long the box sat in various stops during its shipment. The box itself functions as both photograph and camera.

For this exhibition at TSA NY, Hamaguchi will also create a site-specific piece called “Space Watcher,” a pinhole camera made of drywall—the same material most walls are made from today. The piece takes the shape of the corner of a room and is coated inside with photo emulsion. She sets the camera in the corner of the room to record the duration of an event that happens in the space. After finishing the recording, she develops the entire structure as a photograph. The room is directly recorded onto the camera, appearing as a cube projected onto the interior of a triangular pyramid. Moving forms blur or disappear entirely. This work is installed as a camera that records the duration of the exhibition.

In “that which we cannot ever expect to see” tamara suarez porras creates a series of poetic assemblages that consider photography's relationship to the universe. She explores the poetic possibilities of scientific and vernacular archives when decoupled from original context and rearranged. Source material for the photographs and titles range from images and text collected from magazines, books, and other instructional or scientific texts. With visible tears and folds, the images meditate on the impossible physical relationship to galactic bodies of unfathomable scale and at impossible distances, yet able to be held by the hand through the photographic object. This impossibly hands-on relationship to the cosmos is underscored by the works being printed in the black-and-white darkroom. The ubiquity of these photographs across mass media and educational materials develops a set of (false) memories of sites and forms that we cannot ever expect to see in any way other than through an image. A line from Chris Marker’s "Sans Soleil" is a touchstone: “I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.” What does it mean to remember, to know something never encountered with our bodies? How might we get closer to knowing the unknowable? Each print begins with the arrangement of vernacular images of photographic processes and the cosmos collected from magazines, books, and scientific texts, then printed in the darkroom with digital negatives.

Kyoko Hamaguchi, born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, is a conceptual mixed-media artist who lives and works in New York City. By utilizing her daily experiences and communication systems and tools in society, she is constantly searching for ways to invent transient images and shapes to reflect her ever-shifting perspective as an immigrant. Her practice takes form in many different media including photography, sculpture, and installation. She holds an MFA from Hunter College in New York (2020) and a BFA from Tokyo University of the Arts (2015). She has shown in numerous group exhibitions in New York and Japan including at WhiteBox, New York; SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2018, 2019, and 2020, New York; Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Japan; and Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo. She had her first solo exhibition at KOKI ARTS, Tokyo in 2020 and is having her second at ATM Gallery, New York in April 2021.

tamara suarez porras is an artist, writer, and educator from (south) Brooklyn, NY and based in the Bay Area. Her work examines experiences of knowing, remembering, and forgetting. From within vernacular archives, she considers how photographic imagery is used to know the unknowable. She has exhibited nationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, School at the ICP, En Foco Touring Gallery, and Deitch Projects in New York City, as well as fusedspace, Root Division, The Growlery, and Embark Gallery in San Francisco. tamara teaches at the University of San Francisco and California College of the Arts. She is a graduate of NYU’s Photography+Imaging department and from California College of the Arts in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies.