October 29 through November 26, 2016
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 29, 7-10PM
Kellan Shanahan tells us that “Nature itself is the greatest teacher.” He is an astronaut of the universe within us. His ink-on-paper renderings – both in color and black and white – suggest correspondences between the smallest of organisms, patterns and perceptions and the infinite, extra-galactic cosmos.
The virtuosic San Diego 25-year-old’s work will be on display in The Ecstasy of Matter, the artist’s first solo-exhibit at Bermudez Projects. Work displayed will include his intricate, small sketches that suggest various plant micro-biota on 3-D microscope slides and the primitive beauty of the translucent basic unevolved animal inhabitants of a drop of pond water. Others seem to connote certain imaginary fractals of some alternate universe’s mathematics. Or simply a studied construction of butterfly wings. Or a node of a simple cedar branch.
Shanahan’s larger imaginings – as much as two feet across – are rendered in pale, simple colors that spur the viewer’s imagination toward the meaning of shape itself – a kind of textile-suggestive topology of emulated objects of momentary breadth and uncertain duration.
“The purpose of these drawings is to describe nature as form distinct from substance, as patterns and arrangements that lie beneath the immediate reality of objects,” said Shanahan. “What is born to our eyes as the world of things is a phenomenon of fields of energy colliding into each other, a self-assembling system of relations that scales infinitely through time and space, in which what goes on outside our consciousness and within it are the same process.”
Shanahan’s influences reach back a century to some of art’s most literally revolutionary figures, he says, not just in artistry, but in ways of thinking.
“In terms of philosophy I admire most the Russian Suprematists and Constructrivists; (Vasily) Kandinsky, (Naum) Gabo, and especially Kazimir Malevich,” he notes, naming several titans of the early Soviet Avant-Garde.
“Formally, their art looks austere and technical, but I understand it as holding a spiritual commitment to discovering an underlying aesthetic truth to the world. Malevich was sometimes more a guru than artist, and Kandinsky spoke of the ‘secret soul of things’.”
He adds, “It’s easy for us post-moderns to roll our eyes…but they held an urgently sincere belief in aesthetics, something I think we’d do well to return to.”
But Shanahan insists he’s not just stuck in the 20th century artistic past.
“Lately I’ve been into California-finish fetish/surf minimalists, artists like Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Craig Kauffman,” says Shanahan. “I’m drawn to their use of industrial materials, resins, plastics, and fiberglass; along with color palettes drawn from psychedelia and custom car culture. I also find their work to possess the same ethereal quality that I admire in the Russians.”
Mixed-media artist Tara Donovan and sculptor Ursula Von Rydingsvard have also been among Shanahan’s longtime favorites. He says, “Both have organic styles that I find incredibly beautiful, but more importantly they come from a focus on art as emergent from process, which I take as Axiom Number One in my own practice. It’s a bottom up versus top down approach to design.”
And, for that matter, to learning from nature.
Kellan Shanahan (b. 1991) received his BA in Fine Arts from Chapman University. He’s been included in a number of group shows throughout Southern California. He currently lives and works in San Diego.
Bermudez Projects is at 117 W. 9th Street, Space 810, Los Angeles, California 90015. Open by appointment only. Please contact info@bermudezprojects.com to schedule a visit.
