Mika Tajima is a New York based artist who focuses on ideas of human constructions of thought. Tajima was born In 1975 in Los Angeles, California. In 1997 she graduated from Bryn Mawr College where she went for Fine Arts and East Asian Studies.
Mika Tajima creates her works employing many media such as Sculpture, Painting, and Performance Art. She explores ideas about concepts that humans create about the world. Examples of such are her views into the concept of gold prices internationally. She looks into how the idea of gold having a price assigned to it affects the way humans think of it. She creates works of art based on these kinds of ideas about social construction. She also focuses on how an object or a certain space can affect a person’s way of thinking or their psychological state when in or around said object or space.
Mika Tajima, Installation at Elizabeth Dee, New York. Left to right: A Facility Based on Change II, (2010), A Facility Based on Change I, (2010) and A Facility Based on Change III, (2010). Photo by Jason Mandella. Courtesy the artist. © Mika Tajima. Featured in the films Mika Tajima Wants to Hire Contortionists and Mika Tajima Versus the Cubicle.
One particular idea of Mika Tajima is her work with the concept of the cubicle. Specifically the Action Office furniture line by Herman Miller. She thought about how many companies in the 70s and 80s started to use cubicles to separate their workers in the idea that it would produce better work with less distraction. She viewed this use of separation as a form of abuse, and sees it as dehumanizing the workers. The cubicle, in Tajima’s opinion, affects human behavior.
In the work she hired amateur contortionists in business casual attire to do extreme poses around a space of colored cubicles and contemporary chairs. In this work the contortionists poses are being used to show the effects of isolating workers and how it psychologically reprograms workers to think differently. This is shown by the twist of the contortionists bodies.
Mika Tajima, Contortionist salon event, New York, 2011. Performer: Tony Mitchell. Photo by Mika Tajima. Courtesy the artist. © Mika Tajima. Featured in the film Mika Tajima Wants to Hire Contortionists.
Mika Tajima, The Extras, 2010. Silkscreen, Formica, plywood, mirror aluminum, Plexiglas, canvas, acrylic paint; 78 × 60 × 96 inches. Installation view: Transaction Abstraite, New Galerie, Paris. Photos by: Claire Curt. Courtesy the artist. © Mika Tajima
In another piece, Mika Tajima creates a work called The Architects Garden, in this piece she talks about her parents and their work teaching science in her home city of Austin. According to an article on Frieze “Mika Tajima’s exhibition ‘The Architect’s Garden’ had a not dissimilar intention, designed to engage with the artist’s home city of Austin and with the University of Texas’s large campus, where her parents once taught science.”