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Shake the Ground

January 17 - March 15, 2026
Curated by Gentiane Bélanger

Foreman Gallery

Exhibition statement

Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s print work unfolds like the territory, with a strong sense of infinitude. Dense lattices of grooves draw mysterious topographies, sometimes expansive, sometimes cut and multiplied as in quilts, echoing the artist’s delocalized, transnational identity. The handmade papers often from regions in Asia that receive the prints animates these configurations with a luminous transparency.

Through her lines carved into linoleum, Hatanaka explores different superimposed territories: those shaped by the turbulence of water, by ice, wind and snow; those shaped by sensations, perceptions, and affects. The worlds that leave their imprint on paper are both external and internal, empirical and psychic. The historical, regional papers used connect these abstract world maps to very specific lands, through its own materiality contingent on the plants, waterways and traditions that allow them to be produced.

This exhibition brings together several large-format prints on paper as well as printing blocks, where the material, pigments, patterns and the interlacing of veins echo each other. Eddies on the surface of torrents, wind wrinkles in the snow, cracks in the frozen ground of the north, but also lines of flight, lines of desire and trajectories of pathologized symptoms . Sometimes suspended in space, sometimes packed in on themselves as if they were boulders, these large sails of printed paper shake the ground of our convictions and our belongings, and probe our interiority, in the hollow of the furrows formed by our frailties.

The Foreman Art Gallery would like to thank Patel Brown Gallery for lending the works and contributing to this exhibition.

The works are almost entirely created with washi (Japanese paper) made by Kashiki Seishi, a seventh generation family mill in the famous region of Tosa Washi, producing within a tradition of over 1000 years, where Hatananaka was artist in residence. The exhibition encapsulates three years of the artists’ evolving work together, including two documentaries learning with great appreciation about regionally specific, environmentally sustainable papermaking traditions: one in Kochi, Japan, and the other in northern Vietnam – the places of the artists’ ancestry.