Norm Paris and Mark Shetabi “Ghost Stories”

Ortega y Gasset Projects @ The Old American Can Factory

[Image: Mark Shetabi "Monster Movie" (detail) (2018) wood, acrylic, modeling paste, linen bookbinding tape, Plexiglas, aluminum, porcelain, steel, lead, and LED light]

This event has ended.

Ortega y Gasset Projects presents Ghost Stories, a two-person exhibition in the main gallery space, featuring recent work by Norm Paris and Mark Shetabi, curated by Ortega y Gasset Projects Co-Director Lauren Whearty, and Boundless, a site-specific installation in The Skirt by Winnie Sidharta Ambron.

Ghost Stories presents Paris’ and Shetabi’s investigations into the inexplicable, the ghostly, and the ominous. Their works access viewer’s experiences of the familiar, transforming it into a haunting encounter. Norm Paris’ large-scale graphite drawings and plaster sculptures show the material and psychological making and unmaking of his athletes. Dynamic poses of figures found on baseball cards become material and psychological investigations of icons and relics from the past as they look toward the future. Mark Shetabi’s sculptures based on movie theaters and monster films frame our view with computer privacy screens, evoke both distant and intimate space, as one discovers their eerie charms from a very close range. The play of scale in both artists’ work between the monumental and the miniscule flips our expectations of both epic and intimate.

Boundless is an installation of wall paintings and collage pieces addressing identity, and how to represent one’s position and cultural experience through painting. Inspired by the highly vigorous and refined textile traditions within Javanese vernacular style — most of which are executed by women — the patterns on the walls evoke a similarly organic and living quality balanced somewhere between the decorative and something more evocative. The pieces, though contained within themselves, extend into the space through these patterns, loosening the boundaries between them. This constant expansion and contraction creates an environment where fragments and colors ’speak’ to each other. These fragments and edges draw forth excerpts of time, impressions of space, temperature and the metamorphosis of bodies as landscapes; a portrayal of collective history and emotive cultural experiences. The (female) bodies have been transformed into vast and unrestricted landscapes.