Installation Art - Blog Posts

"PALACES: Sound & Sight" collaboration with Pia Coronel | sensory boxes, 24x24x24" | Part of Bushwick Open Studios 2014 + 2015

"...AND NOTHING HURT..." installation | 8' x 55" | paper, acetate, acrylic, oil, fabric, candle, sage & sound accompaniment 

🫀•My Sacred Heart (2024) and GIRLBRAIN (2024)•🧠

•Materials: Costume satin, cotton fabric, polyfill, various threads, watercolor paints

Mixed Media ♻️ LoFi Cassette Girl 📼 Etsy Listing Materials avoiding the landfill:

⭐️ 12 cassette tapes and all of their inners I couldn’t repurpose into mixtapes ⭐️ Various laminates that were too small for other projects ⭐️ One cricut mat that lost its stickiness

Ana Vieira

Ana Vieira’s work is deeply concerned with the body, space, and the ways in which art is sanctified and received. Her artistic career spans multiple disciplines, including theatre, painting, sculpture, photography, sound, environment, and installation. This breadth reflects her poetic approach to art, which continually explores the boundaries of different media.

Her exhibitions, starting in 1968, highlight the themes of her work through their titles, such as Imagens Ausentes (Absent Images) and Ambiente (Milieu). These exhibitions examine dichotomies like public/private, presence/absence, interior/exterior, and transparency/opacity. For example, in one installation, a dining room scene is set up with plates, cutlery, and glasses, but the viewers cannot see it. They hear sounds from the space, but are kept at a distance by a mesh, reinforcing the separation between the public and the private.

Vieira's scenography often features elements like cut-out silhouettes, projections, hidden objects, and revealed rooms. These works extend beyond galleries into public spaces and even the natural landscapes of the Azores, her hometown. As her works expand in scale, they invite the viewer to physically engage with and inhabit the spaces, making the viewer’s body a part of the art experience.

DINING ROOM, ENVIRONMENT (1971), WOMEN HOUSE EXHIBITION, MONNAIE DE PARIS, FRANCE . 2017/2018

MILO'S VENUS, ENVIRONMENT (1972)

WINDOWS . 1978

Chiharu Shiota

"Everything I create is from a personal experience but I want to extend it into something universal." Stepping into one of Chiharu Shiota’s striking installations is like entering an alternate reality: the materials and objects feel familiar, but the logic behind the intricate web structures seem to stem from an unknowable realm. Enveloped in an elaborate web of yarn, you’re left with a subtle, indescribable imprint on the body and mind.

The Key in the Hand, 2015. Installation: old keys, wooden boats, red wool. Japan Pavilion at 56th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy  For the 56th Venice Biennale, Shiota unveiled ‘The Key in the Hand' (2015), a piece created for the Japanese pavilion. In this installation, 180,000 keys gathered through an open call were suspended from dense webs of red yarn, which linked the gallery space to two wooden boats on the floor. A photograph of a child holding a key was displayed alongside four monitors featuring videos of young children talking about memories before and after they were born. For the artist, keys are a personal object that simultaneously keeps our space safe on a daily basis and has the potential to unlock doors to new, unknown worlds. The keys dangling from thousands of red strings evoked a sense of intercon-nectedness and expansiveness, allowing viewers to imbue their own memories and associations to the familiar everyday item. 

Counting Memories, 2019. Installation: wooden desks, chairs, paper, black wool. Muzeum Śląskie w Katowicach, Katowice, Poland For ‘Counting Memories’ (2019), an installation shown at Muzeum Śląskie in Katowice, Poland, the artist envisioned a network of black yarn extending from the ceiling to be a night sky, or a universe, filled with white numbers dotting the space like stars. The piece invited viewers to sit at desks (also entangled in black yarn) where they had the opportunity to answer questions and contemplate the significance of numbers in their lives: Numbers that have special meaning, numbers in the form of dates, numbers connected to personal histories. As with many of her works, the installation attempted to make visible the invisible threads shaping our inner and outer lives.

Chiharu Shiota – A Room of Memorya, 2009, old wooden windows, group exhibition Hundred Stories about Love, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan

Selva Aparicio

My Modern Met

Artist Hand-Carves an Ornate Patterned “Rug” Into a Wooden Floor

This brilliantly carved floor completely transforms an otherwise ordinary room. Now, it's like there's a permanent Persian rug in there.

“I presented this installation as my thesis during my MFA at Yale University,” Aparicio explains to My Modern Met. “Rugs are typically adorned with sacred gardens and oases, and can be moved around the home. This rug stayed put, quietly participating in years of familial abuse. This installation is about covering and exposing, trauma, and bearing witness.

Childhood Memories,  2017, hand carved rug into utility oak floor, (Total Installation 657 sq. ft.)

“My memories are permanently etched, so the soft fabric is represented in hand-carved scars on discarded wood flooring,” Aparicio continues. “I strive to find beauty in the peril and bear witness to the progression of ephemerality-permanence-loss.”