ART-PRESENTATION: Chiharu Shiota-Infinity Lines
Chiharu Shiota is best known for her large scale installations and sculptures that explore the complex relationships between body and mind. Her work evokes memories: a house, a piano, suitcases, keys… objects suspended in time and space by a web of three-dimensional lines. For the lines the artist uses thread, which serve to connect the self to the outside world, our memory with experience, reality with imagination.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: SCAD Museum of Art Archive
Chiharu Shiota presents “Infinity Lines”, a site specific commissioned installation at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, as part of the 8th edition of deFINE ART at SCAD locations in Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia, and Hong Kong. DeFINE ART is an annual program of exhibitions, lectures, performances and public events that highlights emerging and established artists and visionaries. For the exhibition, Shiota has incorporated antique wooden chairs that show evidence of their previous use. Red yarn connects one chair to another and also to the surfaces of the gallery itself, filling the space and tying individual stories and memories together, like neurons mapping memories in the brain. Just as memories and life experiences stay with each individual throughout their lives, the objects in the exhibition retain the personal histories of their owners and symbolically link present and past. Labyrinthine networks of yarn intertwine objects and embody their imbedded narratives, leading viewers along a line of questioning like: who has owned these objects? and why do they own them no longer? Shiota describes her installations as “Drawings in space”. The seemingly endless webs of red or black yarn have ensconced shoes, keys, beds occupied by sleepers, charred pianos and more. For the artist, red yarn connotes the body and human interaction. Performance is a longstanding part of Shiota’s practice. In her installation and performance “Sleeping is like death” at the Galerie Daniel Templon in Brussels, hospital-style beds were imprisoned in what looks like a vast spider’s web. This performance was an expression of Chiharu Shiota’s obsession with the slumbering state: abandonment of the body, estrangement between beings, the presence of a body whose spirit is wandering elsewhere, dreams and reminiscences.
Info: Curator: Aaron Levi Garvey, Assistant Curator: Amanda York, SCAD Museum of Art, 601 Turner Blvd., Savannah, Georgia, Duration 21/2-6/8/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sat 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, Sun 12:00-17:00, www.scadmoa.org
