Taiyo Kimura

Friction / Where Is Lavatory?

The wall installation Friction/Where is Lavatory plays off anxieties about time but utilizes sound to create a disconcerting experience of viewership: comprised of dozens of wall clocks sutured together, the work presents a monstrous vision of time at its most monumental. The clocks, however, are effectively broken, altered so that the second hand of each clock obstructs one another as they sweep across the face. Often combining a sense of physical incongruity and visceral displeasure with touches of humor and cruelty, Taiyo Kimura utilizes conceptual approaches as a means of challenging preconceived ideas about social organization. His work frequently interrogates how we organize space and time through discretely measured units, and in parodying that obsessively precise ways that we mark our very existence – through instruments that direct our bodily movements or denote our sense of time – Kimura invites us to consider our relationship not just to devices but to our very sense of ontological being.