BIO

Shannon Blanton is a visual artist currently based in Northwest Connecticut.  She received her BA from Centre College (Danville, KY) in Art History with a focus on medieval iconography as well as a concentration on studio work, studying with Sheldon Tapley and Janet Link.  Blanton received a certificate in Appraisal Studies of Fine and Decorative Art from New York University (New York, NY).  Early in her career she established a studio practice in Bushwick NY, while also working in the commercial gallery world.  In New York she also Co-Founded Nude with a Goose with Berit Hoff, a pop up focused curatorial duo that exhibited international and emerging artists in spaces around New York City .  Blanton’s work has been shown in group exhibitions around New York, NY and collected internationally.  Always invested in collaboration, Blanton has participated in an artist campaign project with Cole Hahn, as well as designing and painting backdrops for MyHabit.com (Amazon).  Blanton is also invested in art as dialogue, and has worked to foster public conversation through published articles in ArtObserved and ArtLog and as a docent at The New Museum (New York, NY). Blanton currently works out of her home studio along with her partner and their two children in Litchfield County, CT.

STATEMENT

Blanton’s work aims to drop us into a landscape divined by memories, where heliotropism reigns and even shadow has matter.  In these familial portraits perspective is warped leaving perception as the organisms themselves.  Focusing on silhouettes and their inverse the works give an impression of movement somehow collected into stillness.  Many of the works dance with the sunshine themselves as the shadows of tree limbs or the transparency of a piece like Memory Frame allow the work to engage with its environment and in turn invites the viewer to do the same.  Each painting is about the organic world and the organization of perception. 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.