Introduction

Color embodies cultural association. Depending upon one's tradition, hell may be the color of red and the warm range of human flesh tones. Heaven is colored in blues and nurse-uniform white. Greens suggests the land of the living in which anatomy, biology, physics and medicine are the theatres of survival.

Red, blue, and green-- these are the primary constituents of light, of the sun, of photography, of television, film, video and DVD's. All of the millions of manifestations of color are made from varied intensities and mixtures of these primaries. Color, divinely mutant and relative, sometimes slippery to describe in words, has nonetheless been domesticated for its vast symbolic associations. From boys' and girls' toys to pie charts, feng shui, and many cultural rituals, Patrick Nagatani's imagery presented here at once promotes and deconstructs color as the salvation of physical and psychological affliction.

For the artist, this body of work has spanned three decades, beginning with the first image made in 1978. At the time, Nagatani was working in Hollywood as a model-maker for science fiction movies, constucting land and cityscapes, and models such as the futuristic buildings in Blade Runner. In Chromatherapy, as in many of Nagatani's earlier, major bodies of work, he draws upon his early affiliation with set design colorists, as well as on his own preoccupation with the symbolism and emotional power of color. Nagatani employs color as a key element in the structure of his staged photographs, making it the intersection in which body, conciousness and the technologies produce a generative, creative state of existence.

A form of healing practice today, chromatherapy extends back in time to ancient Egypt and Cina and into the future-- as Nagatani himself comments-- by virtue of the light tool used by Dr. Beverly Crusher in the television series Star Trek, to heal wounds and illnesses instantaneously. Chromatherapy is a form of magic, a fiction that becomes fact through believing, or an alternative form of medical remedy that is disregarded because it is unclear how it works at the cellular level. Red promotes energy and is thought to improve circulation and blood cell production. Blue promotes communication and knowledge, and eliminates toxins. Green, because it is located in the middle of the color spectrum, is associated with balance and is used to heal ulcers and bacterial infections. Within the practice of chromatherapy, seeing and experiencing color becomes vital.

The living turn to the power of symbolism to make meaning out of experiences in which hell and heaven seem to coexist in the same act, at the same place. In Nagatani's work, color seeks the living to rescue them. They, in turn, yearn for light, illumination and heat, and reach for its embrace.

Marcella Hackbardt
January 2006