This is especially true when everyday objects such as keys, windows, or love letters are woven into her sculptural landscapes, imbuing them with an elegiac narrative tone in which the object invokes the absence of the human form.1 Such stories have informed Shiota’s use of yarn, and encounters with her installations, which employ the illusory nature of figurative representation, often take on a mythic quality. Enacted by a collectivity of bodies at a scale that mirrors that of religious or civic architecture, Shiota’s sculptural drawings attempt to reach beyond the individual toward a more universal conception of human experience.Īccording to Japanese mythology, an invisible red thread tied to a baby’s finger at birth binds them to a network of people who will play significant roles in their life. This meditative, almost spiritual process allows her to trace the relationship between mind, body, and spirit that is awakened when the body comes into contact with the material world. Instead of engaging with the traditions of craft or fiber art, she uses her material of choice to access new contemplative states, achieved through the simplicity of a single repeated gesture enacted over time. Shiota, who purposely offers very little contextualizing information about her work, has referred to her installations as drawings in three-dimensional space, a description that subverts traditional distinctions between artistic mediums and emphasizes the importance of process in her work. A denial of the sort of “uncovering” or indictment of the museum and gallery space that was popularized in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, Shiota’s work can be seen as a staging of an institutional dance between the individual and the collective body. Humanist in its approach to the institution, Shiota’s practice engages the museum not as a singular entity but rather as the container for the community of individuals it houses at any given time. Shiota approaches physical site as an ideological space, a framework wherein her installations explore the relationships between and within the institutional entities that support the production of each work. The artist’s use of red, black, or white yarn to create monochromatic installations tempers the almost cinematic scope of her formal lyricism. Her vast, ephemeral gestures coopt their surrounding architectural space with abstract lines of yarn woven into fantastical landscapes. Matter becomes a pretext for a discussion of the universal nature of subjective experience and the longing that accompanies it. Shiota’s monolithic site-specific landscapes take on questions of time, permanence, presence, and mortality. In what has been a nearly thirty-year practice of formal distillation, the Japanese artist has developed a transcendent conceptual relationship to her materials. The moment people enter my works, I want them to understand what it is to live and what it is to die.Ī veritable alchemist of her medium, Chiharu Shiota has spent the majority of her career extracting a poetic language from a single material: yarn.
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