In case my mind [betrays] me, let me say one last thing.
At the root of Alexa Hatanaka’s practice is a physical, material experience of territory: settling for months in Nunavut, Vietnam, or Japan, she works with local ancestral papermaking and printmaking techniques to engage with geographies she inhabits both physically and emotionally. Her works become strata, organic forms, echoes of territories recorded as a means to preserve and embody.
Alexa is bipolar, recently diagnosed. A known hypothesis links the origin of bipolarity to the Pleistocene Epoch, where extreme seasonal variation required fast adaptation to climate change. What is now considered an illness may once have been an evolutive response to a shifting ecosystem.
This exhibition holds both: an acute awareness of ecological fragility and an argument for the wisdom held in ways of being too often dismissed as inadequate.
Perspective is always partial. Perception, personal and conditional. In embracing uncertainty as an inescapable part of life, we may find new ways to question the systems we too readily accept as immutable.