NYAB Event - Shauna Born "Galore"

Shauna Born "Galore"

Mulherin + Pollard

This event has ended.

Katharine Mulherin presents the artist Shauna Born’s most recent work entitled Galore at Mulherin + Pollard.

This exhibition runs concurrent with Michael Caine’s show Bad Manners. Though seemingly unrelated, both shows confront audiences with the questions, “What does it mean to offend culture? When do social constructs cross the line into being overly sensitive, therefore limiting and ultimately censoring the honesty of expression?” Subtle sentiments of irreverence and irony resonate
throughout the space, as subjects of consumerism, pop culture, politics, sex, history, the subjects which define culture itself, are addressed vis a vis unexpected and unconventional means.

Born’s show, Galore, features her MFA thesis work which is a series of intricate ball point pen (ink) drawings, a series she has referred to as “All the Boys I’d Like to Fuck”. The images are dainty and refined, however the intent is obscene and candid in the best possible way. The juxtaposition between these images, which are traditional in composition, but blunt in its desires, is a bold move for a number of reasons, most poignant of which is the head-on manner in which the artist confronts social taboos that are expected of female sex.

The series celebrates the urge to reproduce and multiply ‘beauty’. Having amassed an impressive database of appropriated photographs from which to work from, the artist found herself “feeling like the teenage version of myself, totally boy-crazy, flush with hormones and itchy fingers. I was a girl in love with the idea of a beautiful boy—not a ‘man’ mind you—but a boy.” In changing the context in which these images exist—the screen and magazine—to re-imagine them as poetic dandies and romantic heroes, steeped in classic pictorial tradition. This work sets the stage for an exchange between the artist/subject and subject/viewer. Viewers are not passive observers, but become participatory in the erotic circuit into which Born has invited them.

The series is intended to be viewed as one large piece made up of tiny individual parts. Its visual impact is less reliant on the individual or the individual identity of each ﬁgure portrayed, and more concerned with repetition, like a grouping together of several
ﬂowers of the same variety. Throughout the works there is an intimate, if not raw, exploration into the issues of desire and mortality done so through the hundreds of miniature drawings carefully rendered in hatching techniques. Each idealization and categorization of beautiful male types conjure up the meaning of the very word ‘galore’, which can be stretched beyond its common usage (‘existing in abundance, in great numbers’) and can better be associated with the words more charged meaning of of ‘excessive qualities of decadence’.