Japanese artist Midori Harima exhbition breathe includes drawings and a group of Harima’s three-dimensional sculptures created from black and white xeroxes of images found in books, magazines and the Internet.

Midori Harima belongs to a generation of artists raised in a post-World War II Japan, rebuilt under American cultural control. Harima questions how her art can stand against physical and social gravity through experimentation with the physical tension and gravity involved in the art making process. Most of my work can not physically stand up by itself, says Harima. It is a reflection of the position of contemporary art in Japan, far from Japanese tradition and closer to Western sources.

Using non-traditional materials, the hollow figures constructed with the fragments of ordinary mass media images correspond to our managed and disconnected experiences of reality. The end result combines characteristics of physical, psychological and mystical worlds leaving the viewer somewhere between illusion and reality. Harima believes that when perceiving an object, we impose upon it our preconceived notions. There is so much information out there that we experience things before we actually experience them with our eyes.

In Rain Fall, roughly 300 wires suspend a horse. The wires both pierce and surround the animal, creating a barrier preventing the viewer from getting too close. Each wire resembles falling rain but at the same time it physically suspends the horse. This creates a tension between the visual information and the physical structure.