That was my first thought when entering The Network, a voluminous installation by Japanese multimedia artist Chiharu Shiota. For decades her main material has been thread, at times interwoven with found objects like keys, suitcases, or even a charred piano. Her palette is unwavering: black, white, or red string. The Network’s crimson hue against the Hammer Museum’s white walls was immediately evocative of blood and vasculature.
Shiota has long explored ephemeral states such as memory, dreams, and emotions. Through density and its absence, she weaves a tangible, indescribable universality out of these intangible, personal processes. The result is all visceral response. Although thoughts come in — like the thicket of veins — they wash over and recede like a tide. What remains is a total, base sensation of intense physicality. It’s like smelling a forgotten scent from childhood; an instant, hallucinatory flashback of feeling without any cognitive effort, a complete bypass of thinking.
A site-specific sculpture created for, around, and through the lobby’s shapes, it is Kafkaesque and unlike anything commonly encountered inside a building. Ripe with tension, it’s a comforting cocoon and a nightmarish suffocation. On the heels of the popular video game and subsequent TV series The Last of Us, the threads are reminiscent of creeping fungal growth. It’s a transformational, transportive environment. With other art that can mean being transported away or sometimes it’s being transported within. The Network does both.