Mad Systems was honored to partner with Japanese-American artist, Taiji Terasaki and bring to life his exhibition, TRANSCENDIENTS: Heroes At Borders
Two major exhibits were part of his art exhibition installed at the Japansese American National Museum in Los Angeles, CA in February 2020. Per Terasaki, this exhibition, “honors individuals who advocate and fight for those who face discrimination, prejudice, and inequality at borders both physical or psychological. Through video projections on mist, photographic weavings, and audience participation, visitors to this multimedia exhibition are invited to learn about, reflect on, and celebrate heroes in Los Angeles, across the nation and within their own lives.”
The second exhibit Mad was part of in the Transcendients exhibition took place within a shipping container. This container needed to be retrofitted to accommodate the exhibit and let guests in and out comfortably. Visitors enter through an extendable pod and are met with a fog screen draped in the middle of the container. The show starts and projects imagery on the walls and central fog screen. Within the space are eight projectors, four projecting onto walls and two on each side of the fog screen, displaying different images.
As the show begins, a family appears in front of the guests behind a chain-link fence, in an internment camp. Because of the fog screen as a medium, faces of guests on the other side of of the curtain peak through, creating a effect of seeing people you know behind a chain link fence, while you’re looking in upon them.
Per Terasaki: TRANSCENDIENTS: Heroes At Borders will serve as a living memory of the Japanese American internment camps and as a tribute to activists from the arts, inter-faith, refugee, LGBTQ communities and beyond who continue the fight for democracy and justice for all.
Inside the museum was the Mist Theater installation that plays a short movie of Satsuki Ina of Tsuru for Solidarity. The movie is projected through the mist that moves with a somber grace as she recites her poem, “We Came Back For You”. The Mad Team was faced with a challenge as the humidity produced by the fog machine for the theater could not affect the humidity in the gallery. We created a solution by starting with a truss structure and covering it with a double-layered tent where the airflow is designed to ensure that it is laminar around the output of the fog machine. The damp air enters a bank of 10 dehumidifiers before being recycled and pushed back up to the prenup formed by the tent structure and reused to keep the output of the fog machine as laminar as possible.
