Tam Ochiai at Soft Opening

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Ochai's painting collect their painting like a window sill collects dust. The only requisite might be time passing and its loss sedimented of whatever accumulate. You might write your name in the dust, but these collect places as dust. We could just be happy it doesn't look like painting.

Tam Ochiai at Tomio Koyama

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Names, dates, places, things we scour like On Kawara paintings hoping to reassemble and collate some sense from. But the signified, the thing, continuously withdraws. We'll never actually regain or conquer or even know. Names, dates, things are hidden behind the curtain of their signifier and us all looking at blank paintings trying to grasp the thing they have purposely lost behind words for us.


See too: Tam Ochiai at Team Gallery, Inc.

Tam Ochiai at Team Gallery, Inc.

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Referential contingency in painting beside itself, the scrawled names of cities lived and died in by famed and nameless, Borges for instance, visited and left, referent diverting from its pictorial ground and thoughts discrepant between denotation and image.
It serving to use its referent in the same sweep that it negates its ability to mean, expended as sign, cashed in for surface effects, a meaningfully meaningless composition making amends with the cutesy carefree whimsy of its strokes, the passing of importance, passing importance.