Mindy Shapero
Heavy Lighght
April 19, 2007–May 19, 2007The Breeder, Athens
THE BREEDER is pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition of Los Angeles based artist Mindy Shapero titled, Heavy Lightgh.
Mindy Shapero’s work fuses an elaborate, crafty materialism with spiritual undertones.
The multiple layers of the work range from theater and writing, to fantasy, surrealism
and modernism. Her inspiration runs along a narrative line that draws from the fantastic and Romantic literature (a mixture of Mary Shelley, Borges, Kafka, Lovecraft and Poe).
Telling stories is complemented by paragraph-long titles that usually insinuate a deliberately overblown scenario. Mindy Shapero’s hypnotic spiritualism and psychedelic extravaganza give an eccentric twist to ontological questions, while parodying Enlightenment thought, in works fueled with allusions to supernatural forces, esoteric rites and gothic horror.
At her forthcoming show at THE BREEDER, Mindy Shapero will present new works, sculptures and drawings, that connect to an ongoing narrative that takes place inside one’s head, after they have been blinded from staring too deep into a certain talisman, called “blindeded by the light”. The situation that follows after this symbolic loss of vision, leads into a world with monsters and ghostheads that reveal universal truths and lies. Mindy Shapero’s sculptures and drawings are a visualization of these cognitive images.
As Village Voice critic Jerry Saltz writes, Mindy Shapero’s amazing feel for color and materials results in a tactile and visually intensive work with a mesmerizing jolt. Her drawings become transformed into totemic spirits, while the sculptures look like matter organizing itself into other life-forms or states of ecstatic consciousness. These elements of colorful, labor-intensive, shamanistic sensationalism result in works charged with an archetypical, totemic presence. Their highly visual impact and transgressive logic reinforce the connotations towards a critique of rationalism, while staying true to the postmodern tradition of assemblage that unveils the metaphysical/paranormal undertones of Mindy Shapero’s fantasy world.
Recent exhibitions include:
2006 Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC
2005 The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA
2004 Orange County Museum of Contemporary Art, Newport Beach, CA
