Shannon Cannings

For several years, I have had an eloquent, comprehensive artist statement explaining my works’ connections to Americana, gun culture, and nostalgia.  The mostly central toy gun imagery was used as a lure to ignite conversation, a mirror, to make the viewer confront their own ideas. The subjects of my paintings and the text of the artist statement were perfectly in step with one another.  However, as my work has changed and become more experimental and broader in scope, it has become harder to write about it.

 

As the news cycles have gotten louder, more aggressive and complicated, my paintings echoed them with mylar distortions. The guns were replaced by nerf bullets, targets, razzle-dazzle, and camouflage.  In my last solo exhibition, there were no guns, mainly abstracted mylar distortions, and a few introductions of slightly deflated mylar balloons. 

 

And that leads me to where I am now, in a place of transition, an imprecise place. The balloons are becoming lenses through which I am seeing our collective jumbled views. They become portraits of a questioning, struggling society.  I don’t want to make reactionary work about specific events.  And I don’t want my work to wallow or celebrate hopelessness. I want to make work that recognizes the distortion, accepts that our system is flawed, and finds beauty in our communal work in progress.