The Network (Capsule Review)
<p>That was my first thought when entering <a href="https://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2023/hammer-projects-chiharu-shiota" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank"><em>The Network</em></a>, 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. <em>The Network</em>’s crimson hue against the Hammer Museum’s white walls was immediately evocative of blood and vasculature.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>The Last of Us</em>, 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. <em>The Network</em> does both.</p>
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