threads

I am generally a fan of obsessive process-intense one-person art that involves lots of repetitive gluing, scratching, stringing or sanding. I like the point in the process - a week or a month in - when your own doubts begin to surface (am I really going to keep this up?) and when your stalwart friends and family toss up their hands and give in to your kookiness.

Thread is an excellent medium for the o.p.o.p. artist. In Chelsea today, I saw a few intertwined thread works by Chiharu Shiota ("Waiting" at Goff + Rosenthal 537b W. 23rd http://goffandrosenthal.com/ Feb 1 - Mar 10) including an in-site installation and a number of smaller pieces, of which this was the most stunning (once again, pix taken on the run):



I like the fact that there are two light bulbs, with their creepy silhouette of a darkened heart (it's valentine's day) tangled in connective tissue, but the tangle also conjures up (for me) neural networks populated by Baudelairien spiders, all spleen and melancholy.

In today's design economy, a young hotshot would probably find a way to turn those bulbs on and sell it at Moss.

More works by Chiharu Shiota, including some stunning images of the artist's larger installations (some of which are strongly reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois's spidery cages), can be found at http://www.chiharu-shiota.com/