Japan.Chiharu Shiota.1
🧾 DETAILS
Artist: Chiharu Shiota
Year: 2009
Medium: Steel, thread, aviator goggles
Dimensions: 30 × 30 × 30 cm
Category: Contemporary Art
Room: Room 4 — Image, Memory & Identity
🧠 DESCRIPTION
This sculptural work presents a pair of aviator goggles suspended within a dense network of black thread, enclosed in a cubic metal structure. The threads extend in multiple directions, forming a web-like environment that both surrounds and obscures the object.
The goggles, partially visible through this entanglement, appear suspended between presence and disappearance. The structure transforms the object into the center of a spatial and material field.
🔍 SIGNIFICANCE
- Representative of Shiota’s exploration of memory as spatial structure
- Combines object, absence, and environment into a single work
- Demonstrates the transformation of the image into three-dimensional experience
- Evokes themes of time, trace, and fragmentation of identity
- Moves beyond representation toward embodied memory
✍️ INTERPRETATION
In this work, the image no longer resides on a surface.
It is displaced into space—into threads, tension, and enclosure.
The object (the goggles) suggests vision, perception, and memory. Yet it is no longer fully accessible. It is caught within a network that both reveals and conceals it.
The threads function as a materialization of memory:
- connecting without clarifying,
- surrounding without fixing,
- accumulating without resolving.
What remains is not a clear image, but a condition:
👉 memory as entanglement
The work does not present identity directly.
It shows how identity is constructed through layers of experience, loss, and connection.
The image is no longer stable.
It is held in tension.
🧩 POSITION IN THE COLLECTION
This work occupies a primary position within the collection, where narrative dissolves into spatial and mnemonic structures.
It functions as an anchor, articulating a shift from image to environment.
Within the collection, it is distinguished by its ability to materialize absence and relational memory.
Situated within contemporary installation practices, it transforms narrative into an immersive field.
Memory replaces representation.
📚 PROVENANCE
Galerie Christophe Gaillard