Paxico Gallery's Fantastic Sabotage is the first solo-show of Los Angeles-based installation artist, Atsushi Tameda. Much of Tameda's experimental oeuvre resides in the realm of childhood perversions, a place where the violent, horrific, and forcibly precocious pleasures of the child dirty not only the passageways between allegory and experience but also the supposedly clear temporal coordinates of development.


Drawing on both traditions of misogyny and fantasies of freedom, Touch the Spindle and Female Silence cite the classic children's tales "Sleeping Beauty" and "The Little Mermaid" and common technologies of female production to give concrete form to the horror and corporeal limitations of puberty. While obviously fascinated with the idea of childhood sexualities, Tameda also refuses their common, clearly retroactive readings by insisting on the instability of experience. Shy King and demi both suggest the power of boyhood visual languages, a provocative grammar prior to more legible adult articulations of fetishism and perversion.

Perhaps the easiest piece to overlook (or even step upon) is Jelly Doughnut, which derives from Tameda's years in Chicago and narrates a complex relation of conception, abjection, and tragedy.


Other works in the show include Yellow Pistol, a gun composed entirely of LEGO building blocks; Lauren Bear, a video created with the help of a young cousin in the LA suburbs; and Suicidal Pinocchio, where the mutant "boy" hoisted by his own petard offers a revision of Pinocchio's homosocial setting.

Stories from Walt Disney, locally disposed objects, as well as the props of theatricality are paired against such varied techniques as digital image manipulation, soundscapes, and more traditional practices of gilding and performance. Tameda's multimedia work incites contradictory affects of humor, disgust, damage, and curiosity.

Text by Jonathan M. Hall





Suicidal Pinocchio - Installation, 2005
Shy King - Installation, 2005
Yellow Pistol - LEGO blocks, 2005