Pink Houses and Ombré Hot Tubs, On View at a Los Angeles Gallery

An ombré hot tub, a bubblegum pink house, gorgeous, multi-colored, woven wall-hangings — Kayne Corcoran Griffin’s current two-person show with Mika Tajima and Jean-Pascal Flavien is chock full of splashy sculptures, paintings, weavings, installations and more that are right up our alley. The two artists are fascinated with the human tendency to gather in groups, and both Tajima and Flavien create playful work that explores what happens at those sites of assembly.

Negative Entropy, Tajima’s ongoing series of wall hangings, uses Jacquard looms to weave together cotton and acoustic baffling felt, the material typically used to dampen the noise in office buildings. Many of the pieces are woven according to field recordings of sound information from corporate sites such as data centers or large factories (including those that employ industrial-sized Jacquard looms, if you want to be perfectly meta about it). Tajima’s melancholic view of groups and corporate bodies is also apparent in her moody Meridian light sculpture. The bulbs dim and brighten according to the temperament of Twitter users in New Songdo City, South Korea.

The apex of the show is Flavien’s statement house (temporary title) (2016), a pink, room-sized structure in the center of the gallery’s sunny courtyard, where visitors can take a nap on the bed, sit at the desk, or otherwise make themselves at home. Screenwriters were hired to observe and encourage visitors’ actions, posting pithy text and funny photos on the Twitter feed assigned to the house. While Tajima opens the show by unfurling the complications of human congress, Flavien gives us a cheerful happy ending by displaying the potential for merrymaking and diversion in collaboration.

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