My work points to the mechanisms of looking and tensions between visibility, concealment, and entrapment.
I make paintings and drawings to explore the invasive loop of surveillance in a continually connected world. In a time when watching and being watched is the norm, the act of seeing is a double-edged sword. We are both witnesses and participants, voyeurs and exhibitionists, hunters and hunted, forever caught in the loop of looking at screens.
I focus on the mechanisms of looking and the tensions between visibility, concealment, and entrapment. I trace projected fragments of stock photos of binoculars, camera lenses, and bull’s-eye scopes to represent the detached eye of the lens. Incorporating wood grain patterns as netting and camouflage allows me to flatten the pictorial space. Disembodied legs rush up steps as if pursued, suspended in a cinematic moment with no clear before or after, and nowhere to land. Acidic jewel tones reference the quick flash of a photo, challenging the viewer’s ability to focus. The drawings are a fundamental way into the same imagery, using paper, pencils and ink. I layer, interrupt, or obscure images, mimicking the intensity of digital light and the emotional charge of constant alertness we experience with our life online.
This work reflects the disorienting place-no place of social media and the internet. I paint and draw these works by hand, pulling circulating images back into a tactile human space. This labor is a way for me to slow down, touch and negotiate the anxiety in a world where we are constantly watching, being watched, and watching ourselves watching.
“After allowing their eyes a moment to choose a focal point among layers that vie for subversion in the visual plane, viewers of Shelley Kaplan’s series of paintings and drawings will likely study ingrained semblances of crosscut wood in which binoculars seem to suspend themselves until the hand aiming them emerges. The element of movement in this body of work thrives as trompe l’oeil–inexplicably convincing–as Kaplan’s rote pairings of images recede into pattern-blurred blue-yellow-red or monochromatic graphite. Close your eyes after gazing at Kaplan’s freeze-frame abstractions, and the mental click-through points to a looping of out-of-the frame happenings; that they are captured as though without questioning reveals the artist’s sense (whether conscious or not) for the creep of technology’s intelligence.”
Jennifer Price
Poet and mixed format artist