STATEMENT

As the late Barry Commoner put it “everything is connected to everything else” and my work and life are no exception. As a painter and multi-disciplinary woman artist, I’ve been experimenting and making art since the mid 1980s, with the past 30 years spent living and working in New Orleans. For a myriad of reasons, my practice changed drastically during the evacuation and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. First, I found myself observing and documenting the persistent and fecund nature that was all around me and our broken city, it was an insistent sign of hope just as much as the tight community that got even tighter in the aftermath. Opportunities came in the form of residencies, my first one in NYC through LMCC in December after Katrina. At the time I didn’t really understand how grateful I would become that I was not allowed to use oil paint because of it’s toxic fumes and instead was forced to switch mediums. I was, and still am, a very wet painter fundamentally engaged in the fluid dynamics of the diluents of paint. With oils that meant lots of odorous mineral spirits. That restrictive move to acrylic likely helped me live as much as it changed my work. I was diagnosed with breast cancer the following year, an ordeal that took me on a journey through strained hospital and personal resources in a city not fully recovered, then on a deep dive looking inward at my own internal body to understand what was going on and how to recover. First I found myself looking keenly at the natural world, a practice that has only deepened, then I found myself looking at my actual cells which gradually morphed into an exploration of biology and organisms that inhabit our world. My oil paintings, already in a kind of conceptual/alchemical transition, became acrylic, and my subject matter transformed from art historical and contemporary political juxtapositions into phenomenological events and biological species expression reflecting a microscopic viewpoint and no longer beholden to the picture plane. The transformation was fruitful; the first acrylic painting I ever produced, in 2006 – a huge 28 painting grid, is in the permanent collection of the Ogden Museum. I continue to conduct a kind of fieldwork along side my painting: documenting and researching every environment that I find myself in, from swamp to backyard. Much of my video and installation comes out of this endeavor and it has heavily influenced the abstract biological phenomenon that I explore in my work. My worldview was profoundly reshaped and I am grateful for it.

I’m a deeply intuitive practitioner with a delicate, gestural approach to painting, color and subject matter. My paintings are consistently animate and sometimes humorous. My practice can be best explained as act of participation in the biological world through intuition and action. Everything is an event in nature and the fact of our interconnectedness in a living microcosm that we don’t fully comprehend is at the core of my current work. In the same way that the network of a forest is interconnected I’m building associative relationships between paintings, an ecology of thought and image, often in grid format, which implies that more is more, just like our earth systems; the complex is made up of many interconnected members, helpful to single out for comprehension but ultimately all fundamental to the whole. My forays into the cypress swamps and forests of Louisiana and the cedar bogs and boreal forests of Michigan, foraging for fungus and exploring the inter-webs of nature, have helped me to begin to perceive the whole and I am in awe. We are surrounded by amazing phenomenon; all around us light, sound waves and particles are fundamental to the way we perceive our world. All around us microorganisms are reproducing and communicating in sophisticated ways that seem outside the realms of common understanding. These phenomena are inherently abstract to us, often by virtue of their invisibility to the naked eye, so the language of abstraction that I employ embodies the subject conceptually and practically. Animals, insects, plants, trees, water – our own bodies – are all teaming with drama that we are just a small part of, and often only understand a small part of. To a large extent my work is a kind of homage to that fact.

BIO

Born in Ann Arbor, MI, Shawn Hall has lived and worked in New Orleans since 1997. She earned her MFA at the Mount Royal School of the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she was a Patricia Harris Fellow. She has a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an AS in Science from Delta College in MI. In 2017 Shawn was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. She has been an artist-in-residence at School 33 in Baltimore, the LMCC in NYC, 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica, CA, the Santa Fe Art Institute, and Isadore Newman High School. Shawn was in residence and toured with her collaborative installation/performance HOW TO BUILD A FOREST, which premiered at the Kitchen in NYC in 2011 and went on to Universities and art spaces around the Eastern and Southern USA with it’s last showing at the CAC in New Orleans in 2015. Her work has been featured at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art and CAC in New Orleans, The Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach, FL, the Alexandria Museum in Alexandria, LA, along with galleries in New York, Dallas, Miami and Nashville. Her work has been reviewed nationally in Art Papers, New Art Examiner, Hyperallergic, dialogue and Pelican Bomb and is included in the permanent collection of the Ogden Museum and Linklaters Corporate collection in NYC, as well as numerous private collections in the USA and Europe.