String Theory - The Beautiful Non-Euclidean Horror of Chiharu Shiota

Any regular reader of The Cosmicomicon knows my love of the Japanese.  The people, the land, the food, Bushido, the cultural emphasis on precision, and the almost genetic embrace of the Weird.  The Japanese have and always seen the world differently than western eyes, and that's a wonderful thing. 

So it surprises me not a whit when Ives introduced me to the gorgeous and sanity threatening art of Chiharu Shiota. 

 

The canvas is half empty space surrounding commonplace objects of a life commonly lived, where both memories and the best laid plains got derailed by the emergence of something sinister and... growing. 

The medium is simple black string, made into something monstrous, like a billion groping tentacles reaching into our reality from someplace vast and dark.  Or an alien plague spreading with the force and tactics of a monstrous, primordial mold.

 

Ghostly, ghastly, spectral and oddly aggressive, Chiharu Shiota is tapping into something deep and profound, creating a colossal version of the end of things via innumerable and unnameable strands. 

Much like art, horror is the sum of its parts, be they small or impossibly large...  The few or the infinite...

The Genius at work