Hitchcock Trilogy

“On the surface, Rea Tajiri’s work reads like the standard deconstruction of appropriated popular media via text to which we have grown accustomed in the ’80s. But this is a work of remarkable evocation and resonance that counterpoints and complements the scores of Hitchcock films with ‘meta-narrative’ possibilities. These possibilities occur by doubling the inherent distance from the appropriated subject, standing twice removed in the realm of parallels rather than parodies. Vertigo offers obliquely drawn character studies, Psycho dwells ominously on the portraiture of two women, and Torn Curtain offers a procession of endless beginnings. In each, Tajiri ‘mirrors the mirror’—she departs from her own subjective perception rather than the original, and creates a new scenario.” —Michael Nash, Reconstructed Realms (Long Beach Museum of Art, 1989)