Takeshi Tamai stresses hard-earned bounty. This bounty while difficult to describe is off somewhere between a memory and a gate on unfixed reality. The photographic images on view are medium sized and framed, behind glass. The content however is almost impossible to decipher: images blown past their capacity to hold any account of the recognizable. However it is this very impossibility, without any clear point of reference or context, 'past specificity', that seems the focus of the show.

A short text by Tamai at a desk before you enter Roentgenwerke space mentions sea and childhood experience. It's good to read before you enter. And notice too; that another sheet--a list of the works and their titles--has a number of red dots. This is good, too.

Once born into the small gallery space, leaving the red dots behind, the next reasonable thing to do is move towards something recognizable.
A sheet of heavy glass, suspended horizontally, has upon it a small vase with a flower. At one edge of the glass is some scribble. I couldn't make this out except it resembled Japanese writing in that it seemed to go top to bottom right to left, and in this case writing off the edge of the glass altogether. The writing perhaps represents thoughts--thoughts that at that moment of jotting down, or scribbling, gathered no concrete meaning. They represent thoughts all the same--Japanese thoughts. That's how the writing went.
For me at least, these specifics, their indeterminate meaning, shored up confidence to move to the photographic images on the wall behind glass.

Water and island, umbilical cord and sea, amidst a lot of reduced color and grey veils courtesy of a camera that can only do as much as it can, the conditions in which the images were caught perhaps not suited to this recording gizmo.

I have no memory of womb life, but somehow looking through the glass into the zones of the blocked off, and then with the eyes moving up to some small area to something I think is recognizable, I begin to consider that these undefined zones prior to birth would have been the recognizable experience--the things I was able to make sense of every day in the womb.
In one photograph something resembles an umbilical cord. Pre-born it is easy to understand, also just after birth, but then it’s gone to leave only a dip in the stomach—a scar. In another photograph a small soft focus takes on some image of a far off idyllic island. Pre-born, I would hardly understand that, though the out of focus surroundings would likely hold full meaning.

I came to think, too, that these photographs on the wall were more installation. The suspended sheet of glass, the vase, and the flower, could be seen reflected on each glass that protected the photographs.

All things taken: each side, each view, first appearances, has a tenuous hold on the outside world you and I know. Then, with a little strain; creative effort; some push, a bud gets delivered. Deep urges, after-all, are they not quiet schisms on the threshold of explosion?

Till Moss Grows On, Takeshi Tamai at Roentgenwerke March 5 till April 2, 2005.

View other work by Tamai here

text and photo credits brent hallard 2005