A channel devoted to screening video works from our collection. Each work will be viewable for four days, beginning and ending at noon.

Coming soon: 
Tabaimo / Dolefullhouse
9/17 - 9/20

TABAIMO
dolefullhouse, 2007

Single channel video installation with large panoramic screen, dimensions variable. © Tabaimo / Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi and James Cohan Gallery

screening 9/17 - 9/20

“When I think of a dollhouse, I have an image of a Western small house with rather heavy small furnishings. If there is a doll inside, it should wear a laced dress. A lovely house where you can set things you think simply beautiful by look, free from goods which people have made for actual use in modern living, seeking for convenience in housing conditions or usability or cost-saving. If we have a dollhouse in front of us, we can give full play to our imagination, lying down on a canopy bed or even putting on a dress with a tight corset.

In our time, a dollhouse has a great responsibility to be an ‘ideal house.’ The meaning of the word ‘ideal’ , which is sometimes used as an antonym to the word ‘reality’ , can be divided into a relative ideal that is feasible, and an absolute ideal that is impossible to achieve. A dollhouse has possibilities to be ideal in both meanings and therefore it is likely to be referred as an ‘ideal house.’ When those ‘ideal houses’ exist in our ‘real houses’ where we perform normal daily activities, there are things that have seemingly the same forms but have conflicting meanings. They exist as if in the forms of a matrioshka and their relationships are extremely contradistinctive.

I am not much interested in the act of only looking at an ‘ideal house’ which someone has made up with the collection of carefully chosen furnishings. However, imagining how the person who cherishes the ‘ideal house’ lives in his/her real life, and escapes from their reality gives me a great excitement. When a small house contained in an actual world becomes heavier than a real house, the structure of a layered personal world will change, and the small world could overwhelm the real life that is physically way larger than it. Such a strange structure could be easily explained by taking a container ‘house’ as an example, since it is an important place to be for most people in our real life.”
    -Tabaimo