///TARO HATTORI : INSTALLATION

Taro Hattori is an installation artist. He has been awarded his residency at Kala Art Institute, Djerassi Foundation, Taipei Artist Village, McColl Center for Visual Art, and Headlands Center for the Arts. Hattori's work has been exhibited at numerous venues, including Contemporary Art Gallery in Opole, Poland; LMAN Gallery, Los Angeles; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Mission 17; The Lab, San Francisco; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito; Swarm Gallery, Oakland; Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago; The Asian American Arts Centre, NYC and Ssamzie Space, Seoul. He has recieved an Artist Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation. He curated exhibitions at Mission 17, San Francisco, and Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, and currently serves as a curatorial committee member at The Lab, San Francisco. He holds a BA in Clinical Psychology from Sophia University, Tokyo and a MFA in Time Arts/Video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

"My art practice is a way of measuring distances between myself and things that are unacceptable. I try to define myself by examining what I hate, what I feel uncomfortable with, and what I do not understand. Dealing with those "unacceptable" elements as significant constituents of my world, I try to integrate them with other "pleasurable" elements to render my world more coherent and balanced. This is my search for order, which is so often vulnerable to the power of chaos in our society. Just as a refrain or ritornello in music develops through the course of a composition and gives it unity, I use order as a regulatory framework to make my position visible in relation to that of my subject matter. In the search for order, my work functions like a machine. As Paul Klee's Twittering Machine illustrates the chirping of birds through the movement of an off-centered shaft, my work reveals a sort of "mechanical" undercurrent of factors in my private and public life. This hidden undercurrent shows how the viewers and I play our roles in the condition of our contemporary life."

Winter 2010 Artist-in-Residence
January 11, 2010 - March 22, 2010