Art Historian, Mara Holt Skov wrote this text for my installation “Penetration” shown at CCA.
Adjunct Professor Taro Hattori works across all dimensions to create pieces that intervene in specific sites and settings while commenting on social, environmental and political structures. Hattori’s ordinary 2D cardboard has been carefully designed to slide together into 3D structures that can be easily stored, transported and assembled on site. Cardboard is such a ubiquitous and inexpensive material that it is almost a radical act to treat it like Hattori does as if it were precious.
Penetration, the provocative sculpture installed here‹part missile, part phallus‹is about both the action of penetration and the state of begin penetrated. Hattori commandeered nearly every plinth, pedestal and vitrine on the Oakland campus to create this installation. The sculpture runs right over the empty gallery furniture to reflect the often complex and contradictory relationship between artists and galleries. It provokes and stimulates and even threatens to take over the entire gallery space.
Penetration has appeared at several regional sites such as the rotunda at Oakland City Hall, the Oakland Port, Rancho Seco nuclear power plant and Area 51, Nevada among others. At each site, Hattori photographs the work to bear witness to its presence there. For this installation he used video to record the process of assembling and placing the components and the result is a fast motion home movie of a day in the life of an itinerant artwork.