The huge line to enter Chiharu Shiota’s exhibition at Chelsea’s Templon Gallery last weekend speaks to the capacity of the Berlin-based Japanese artist to mesmerize audiences with the scale and intense labor of installations that elaborate on her ongoing theme of human connectivity. A temporary installation fills the gallery’s front room, acting as portal to the rest of the exhibition and a place to marvel at the seemingly simultaneously chaotic and orderly network the artist created by suspending book pages in a web of thick white thread stapled to walls and floor. Titled ‘Human Rhizome,’ the piece references an underground network of roots; in Shiota’s interpretation, the written word acts as an unseen communication network. (On view through March 9th).
