Shannon Wright “Heroic Measures”
Mulherin + Pollard
This event has ended.
Mulherin + Pollard presents a new exhibition of sculpture, photography and mixed media works by California-based artist Shannon Wright. Wright’s work depicts a dystopian built environment whose sole guiding principle is economic utility.
Wright creates fictitious “products” that might appear to be government-issued or sold by Home Depot, in a humorous attempt to restore dignity to landscapes ravaged by industrialization and unchecked development. In her piece Folly (Colosseum of Rome), Wright uses the ubiquitous language of the module to mimic or parody a revered edifice of the western world. Blurring the generic forms of bike rack, cattle pen, and crowd barrier, its fifty-two arches form an inexplicable “architectural folly” in a run-down industrial zone of the Silicon Valley. Another sculptural work, Flourish (Public Art), proposes that urban blight can be ameliorated through the addition of strategically placed curlicues. In her Historic Preservationist (Heavy Equipment Tires) series, the artist re-interprets four decorative traditions from around the globe into the visual language of huge earth-moving equipment tires that may soon facilitate their extinction. This series responds to the vast destruction of villages in contemporary China, and to the loss of the centuries-old traditions that relied on the societal structure of the village.
Shannon Wright was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1969 and was raised in Sydney, Australia. She earned her BFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University and her MFA in Time Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been shown throughout the U.S. and abroad, including in Chicago, New York, London, and Finland. Since 2002 she has taught at San Jose State University, where she is coordinator of the Spatial Art program.
[Image: Shannon Wright “Folly (Colosseum of Rome)” , Chromogenic print on aluminum, 27.7” x 37.4”, 2014]
Media
Schedule
from March 28, 2014 to April 20, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-03-28 from 18:00 to 21:00