March 22 - May 2, 2009

IN THE BACK ROOM

WARD SHELLEY

The Paintings

In the Back Room, Ward Shelley will have an exhibition of his timeline paintings -- elaborate narrative works that use illustration, data plotting, and graphical conventions. "Re-Materializing Art" depicts artists and careers in the so-called "dematerialized" or "live" art forms. Subjects include the life and times of Carolee Scheemann, Pat Oleszko, Jack Smith and Arto Lindsay.

As the artist explains, "My paintings/drawings are attempts to use real information to depict our understandings of how things evolve and relate to one another, and how this develops over time. More to the point, they are about how we form these understandings in our minds and if they can have, in our culture, some kind of shape.  Usually I choose topics from art or cultural history, such as the arc of an artist's career and its influences, or the effect of particular ideas in an aesthetic or political movement. They are "wide-screen,” with all information available to the interacting eye at every moment.”

In a sense, once the topic of a painting is chosen, the content is "determined.”  It is history, a matter of record.  But we know this content is mediated in a thousand ways before it takes shape in our awareness.  Moreover, content is also shaped by the receiving mind which, as a pre-existing form itself, exerts a strong shaping influence (contemporary studies of cognitive dissonance are describing this effect). It is the mutually formative effects of subject/mind and object/world that gives shape to the space that exists between them. These paintings are a record of this shaping process. They are about the struggle of form to express content in the cognitive space that exists between the Subject (us) and the Object (the world). If that cognitive space is a territory, these paintings are landscapes of that territory."

BIOGRAPHIES

WARD SHELLEY works as an artist in Brooklyn, New York. He specializes in large projects that freely mix sculpture and performance. Utilizing eclectic influences and a variety of media, Shelley’s installations defy classification. Over the last five years, Shelley has concentrated on bizarre functioning architectural pieces in which he lives and works during the exhibition monitored with live surveillance video equipment.

Shelley also works on a series of diagramatic paintings, timelines of art-related subjects such as the careers of artists working in de-materialized media and the history of art scenes. The best known of these is the Williamsburg Timeline Drawing and Downtown Body, recently published in Bomb Magazine.

He first exhibited as an artist in Miami. He earned his Masters degree from New York University and has been working and showing in New York since then.  He moved his studio to Williamsburg in 1994 and also began exhibiting in Europe at that time.

Shelley has exhibited in more than 10 countries. Among works from the last 10 years are the interactive video-environment The Cube, the legendary Mir 2 Project, and Voyage Platform.  In 2004 Shelley lived and worked inside the walls of Pierogi Gallery for 5 weeks for an exhibition called We Have Mice.  Shelley also works with the collaborative artist group BBS and talented young artists such as Douglas Paulson and Alex Schweder with whom he realized the monumental Flatland project at New York's SculptureCenter in 2007.

Ward Shelley's work is in a number of museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Art Museum, and The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Last year Shelley received a painting and Sculpture award from the Joan Mitchell foundation, and has been a fellow of the American Academy in Rome since 2006. He has received NYFA and NEA fellowships in sculpture and new media categories, a Bessie Award for installation art, as well as private foundation grants from the Jerome Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. He is represented by Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, New York where he will have an exhibition of new work in summer 2009.

Before and during his art career he has also worked in advertising, construction, teaching, special events, theater, rock bands, and built a 37-foot sailing sloop.

The artists would like to thank the inimitable Alan Altman for his indispensable contributions. Exhibition made possible in part by: The Kohler Foundation; The Mayor's Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, City of Seattle; 4Culture.