chiharu shiota

In her site-specific installation works, Japanese-born, Berlin-based artist Chiharu Shiota spins cocoon-like webs and builds gallery-sized labyrinths composed of window frames to create her own form of artistic architecture. Both visually striking and physically imposing, Shiota’s artworks produce – what is described in a recent exhibition catalogue as – “a compelling tension of sublime intimacy and haunting imprisonment.” Her use of the frames, in particular, plays with ideas of openness and enclosure, whereby the windows represent uncrossable boundaries and borders. Similarly, the black threads that produce thousands of small intersections appear to symbolise spatial impenetrability and chaos. These maze-like and somewhat inaccessible spatial compositions seemingly draw on the tangled constructions of the mindscape and move psychological anxieties from the interior to the exterior.

Shiota’s latest work can currently be viewed until 30 September 2010 at the Museum on the Seam in Jerusalem, Israel where her art is part of a group exhibition entitled, “HomeLessHome.”