Shannon Blanton

Shannon Blanton’s work is about the organic world and the organization of perception. Through her use of oil paint, natural materials, fiber textiles and Japanese ink, Blanton plays with foreground and background, alluding to connection as well as chiaroscuro. Proximity or physical contact may appear to illustrate connections within the work, but that same nearness can also function as a filter, obscuring broader meanings. Through a close focus on organic connection, Shannon Blanton’s work filters visual information, culminating in imagery that is both active and static. Light source and shadow sources orbit each other throughout the works, allowing the viewer to inhabit multiple visual spaces simultaneously without knowing—or needing to know—the source of either light or shadow. Rather, the focus lands upon the shadows and highlights themselves, changing illumination into the subject and bringing filters to the foreground of subjecthood. Both the content and the execution of each work draw from Blanton’s engagement with the vagueness of memories, how perception of visual and emotional tethers can be both veiled and morphed, and how memory might be a shared faculty across all organisms.