SCAF – Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

Collection+ is conceived as a hybrid project with a specific, cross-pollinating purpose. A selection of the 800 works in the Gene & Brian Sherman Collection will be scrutinised and assessed by invited curators. Each curator will select a single artist and research collections nationally and internationally in order to identify significant complementary or contrasting work by the same artist.

‘The goal is perhaps a little unusual: vignette exhibitions with a primary emphasis on collectors whose passion for specific artists’ work will mesh with our own sensibilities and, it is hopes, form unexpected and intriguing conversations’ Gene Sherman, 2013

Doug Hall, distinguished curator and former director of the Queensland Art Gallery, has constructed an exhibition around the alluring and evocative work-Dialogue with Absence– by Japanese installation artist Chiharu Shiota.

Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972) is a Japanese performance and installation artist best known for creating monumental yet delicate, poetic environments. Central to the artist’s work are the themes of remembrance and oblivion, dreaming and sleeping, traces of the past and childhood, and dealing with anxieties.

Chiharu Shiota currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. In 2011, her work was featured in two solo exhibitions, the “Memory of Books”, in the Gervasuti Foundation in Venice and “Home of Memory”, in La Maison Rouge in Paris. In the same year, Shiota’s work was also part of the group exhibitions “Inner Voices” 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan and at the “Biennale international d’art contemporain de Melle”, Melle, France. Currently, Shiota’s work can be seen worldwide in Japan (Where Are We Going?, Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa), France (Labyrinth of Memory, La Sucriére, Lyon) and Australia (State of Being, The TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria). In 2013, Shiota’s work will be featured in a solo exhibition in the Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, Germany.

SCAF extends heartfelt thanks to the following collectors who have so generously lent their artworks to this exhibition:

• DETACHED, Hobart
• Julian and Stephanie Grose, Adelaide
• The Balnaves Collection, Sydney
• The Mordant Family Collection, Sydney
• Studio Chiharu Shiota, Japan
• Private Collection, Melbourne

Biography courtesy Haunch of Venison

SCAF Project 17