Piranesi/Shiota: Prisons of the Imagination

The exhibition juxtaposes Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s series of prints “Carceri d’invenzione,” from ca. 1761, with Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota’s 2012 installation Stairway: a web of black threads featuring a staircase. Shiota's heaped yarns create hatches and spaces reminiscent of etching and of Piranesi’s architectural fantasy spaces. The culture-dependent prisons of passion and nightmares exist in the artists’ imagination and incarcerate dreams and memories.