Posted on Wednesday, December 7, 2011 by Jim Norrena
California College of the Arts, the San Francisco Mayor's Office of Protocol, and the San Francisco‐Osaka Sister City Association are pleased to present a special exhibition by San Francisco sister cities visiting artist Chiharu Shiota. Shiota is currently teaching at CCA as a Graduate Program in Fine Arts visiting faculty member, and was recently a guest lecturer for CCA's Design and Craft Lecture Series.
Shiota is a Japanese performance and installation artist now living in Berlin. She is best known for creating environments that are room-filling and monumental, yet delicate and poetic. She focuses on themes of remembrance and oblivion, dreaming and sleeping, traces of the past and childhood, and dealing with anxieties. Many of her installations involve impenetrable webs of black thread that enclose household and everyday objects: a burned-out piano, a wedding dress, a lady's mackintosh, sometimes even the sleeping artist herself.
Other bodies of work involve window frames and bed frames. Shiota stacks them up to form sweeping architectural structures that seem to defy gravity: a house, a high tower, an architectural landscape. She spent several years training in Germany with Marina Abramović, who influenced her interests in exploring physical endurance and the psychology of spatial perception.
Global Influence
In the past several years alone Shiota's solo and group exhibitions have been featured in galleries and museums across the globe: England (Haunch of Venison, London); France (Galerie Christophe Gaillard, La Maison Rouge, Paris); Germany (Gallery Goff + Rosenthal, Berlin); Italy (Gervasuti Foundation, Venice); Japan (The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Kenji Taki Gallery, Tokyo); Poland (Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw); Spain (Galería Nieves Fernandez, Madrid); Switzerland (Rotwand Gallery, Zurich); and the United States (Mina Dresden Gallery, San Francisco; Goff + Rosenthal, New York), to name just a few.
Shiota is currently planning an exhibition in 2012 at the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art in Kagawa (a prefecture of Japan located on Shikoku island).
San Francisco Exhibition Details
Opening Reception: Thursday, December 8, 6-8 p.m.
Location: Mina Dresden Gallery | 312 Valencia Street | San Francisco CA 94103
Viewing: Wednesday‐Saturday, December 7‐10; and Tuesday, December 13; noon to 5 p.m.
For questions, contact Holly Castrillón: 510.594.3783 or hcastrillon@cca.edu
About San Francisco‐Osaka Sister City Association
Founded in 1957 under the leadership of Mayor George Christopher, The San Francisco-Osaka Sister City Association helps build bridges of friendship and commerce between these two vital centers of culture and finances. Its programs support individual and civic exchanges that foster better understanding and appreciation between citizens on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. It is San Francisco's oldest sister city relationship. Learn more »