ART CITIES:Paris-Chiharu Shiota
Chiharu Shiota is best known for creating room-filling, monumental, delicate and poetic environments. Central to the Chiharu Shiota’s work are the themes of remembrance and oblivion, dreaming and sleeping, traces of the past and childhood, and dealing with anxieties. Chiharu Shiota in her installations often employs the use of everyday objects, within her work to explore the relationship between living and dying and to access memories found within these objects.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Templon Archive
Chiharu Shiota presents two in-situ installations and a series of new sculptures in her solo exhibition “Inner Universe” that some may see as the mind, others as consciousness, and which transcends the body, connecting beings to each other. The exhibition opens with a series of her signature sculptures of red, white and black threads. The mysterious boxes deconstruct our conception of the body: levitating clothes, anatomy books, personal belongings. As if crystallised in these tight weavings, they bear witness to everyday life while raising universal, metaphysical questions. As the artist explains: “the thread separates us from this physical presence within the object, but at the same time, this structure allows me to create a new space. Piling up layer after layer of cut, tangled and knotted thread creates the entirety of the universe bound to this frame”. This palpable detachment from earthly life is countered by a new set of sculptures made of imperishable materials. Blown-glass “Cells” suggest almost abstract forms of cells and organs bursting with life, while the “In the Hand” bronzes, moulds of her own hands, seem to bring the material alive. On the walls, her woven “Skin” canvases cover the space with skin that is both microscopic and cosmic. The highlight of the exhibition comes in the form of an installation of sheets of paper spiralling up to the top of the roof. Akin to a whirlwind of vital energy, the work presents death as a stage in the cycle of life, the accession to a larger dimension. In the eye of the vortex, bronze sculptures representing parts of the artist’s and her family’s bodies are placed on the floor and connected by interlacing threads. “I want to scatter pieces of my body on the ground; my absence is thus embodied, and each of these parts evokes much more than my entire body could ever do.’ By giving visible form to the ‘red lines invisible to the human eye”, Chiharu Shiota thus seeks to give us a glimpse of the complex relationships between beings and the potentially eternal interdependence of consciousnesses.
Info: Galerie Templon, 28 rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare, Paris, Duration: 30/5-25/7/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.templon.com
