The last time Tadashi Moriyama was in Hartford, his show at Real Art Ways was about “planetalgia,” or planetary nostalgia, meaning the feeling that we are trapped on Earth.
Moriyama is back with a new show at EBK Gallery in Hartford. Now his acrylic-and-ink works are focused on how we are trapped not on Earth, but by ourselves, in our dysfunctional love affair with technology.
“I love technology, but at the same time I hate it. When I start working on a laptop, I think I’m going to spend two or three hours and it becomes five hours. You don’t realize that time has passed and you get this headache. I feel like there is a knot inside my head, my head is tangled up in wires.”
The artworks in the exhibit called “Sprawl” show human figures trapped in enclosing circles of city buildings, being strangled by wires, all the while using technological gadgets such as iPhones and tablets.
The piece “iPhone Abyss” shows a faceless man with six hands, each holding a cellphone. “I use an iPhone every day, every second. It starts making me crazy,” Moriyama said. “I feel a torment about a smartphone. It’s putting me into a tiny little space.”
“Meet Me at My Virtual Forest” shows two horses ridden by a naked man and woman. “I’m interested in the phenomenon of online dating. All my single friends are on it. … Sometimes you don’t meet them. You just chat online and then disappear and don’t meet at all,” he said. “They make this virtual place. They make themselves look better. I gave them horses to make them more attractive.”
In “Sink, Swim, Consumed,” a man with four arms and four legs “is drowning in the eternal hell of networks.” “Colossus Dominating Networks” comments on the male-centric Internet milieu. In “Venus with a Mirror,” a nude woman poses into not a mirror but a tablet, taking a selfie. Moriyama himself said he has never taken a selfie except once, for his Facebook profile picture.
The “labyrinth of data” we all are exposed to every day is inescapable, as he shows in his work “Oblivion.” It centers on a skull in the center of the nest of wires.
“I heard the term ‘the right to be forgotten.’ I liked it. The Internet remembers everything and records everything,” he said. “Sometimes I feel like it should be like a human brain, that some things should be forgotten.”
“SPRAWL” BY TADASHI MORIYAMA will be at EBK Gallery, 218 Pearl St. in Hartford, until Oct. 11. The opening reception is Saturday, Oct. 3, from 6 to 8:30 p.m. The gallery is open by appointment: www.ebkgallery.com.
