Shake the Ground. Au creux des sillons

Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s print work unfolds like the territory, with a strong sense of infinitude. Dense lattices of grooves draw mysterious topographies, sometimes expansive, sometimes cut and multiplied as in quilts, echoing the artist’s delocalized, transnational identity. The​​​ handmade papers often from regions in Asia​​ ​that receive​ ​the prints animates these configurations with a luminous transparency.

Through her ​​​lines carved into linoleum​, Hatanaka explores different superimposed territories: those shaped by the turbulence of water, by ice, wind and snow; those shaped by sensations, perceptions, and affects. The worlds that leave their imprint on paper are both external and internal, empirical and psychic. ​The historical, regional ​​ ​​p​aper​s used​ ​connect​ these abstract world maps to very specific lands, through its own materiality contingent on the plants, waterways and traditions that allow them to be produced.

This exhibition brings together several large-format prints on ​ ​paper as well as printing blocks, where the material, pigments, patterns and the interlacing of veins echo each other. Eddies on the surface of torrents, wind wrinkles in the snow, cracks in the frozen ground of the north, but also lines of flight, lines of desire and trajectories of ​pathologized symptoms​​ ​. Sometimes suspended in space, sometimes packed in on themselves as if they were boulders, these large sails of printed paper shake the ground of our convictions and our belongings, and probe our interiority, in the hollow of the furrows formed by our frailties.

The Foreman Art Gallery would like to thank Patel Brown Gallery for lending the works and contributing to this exhibition.