JIM SHAW
2013-12-16While Shaw’s methodology embraces a multitude of mediums and approaches, this show of drawings varying in scale and narrative subject highlights a crucially important part of his oeuvre. Part of a ground-breaking group that graduated from CalArts in the late 1970’s including Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler, Shaw’s practice incorporates a dense medley of iconographic references in an ongoing creative process, which borrows from art history, genre cinema, cartoons, consumerism, religious imagery, history, current affairs and the media. Long-term narrative driven works are psychologically charged with the strange revelatory absurdity of dreams and steeped in references to American pop culture.
Shaw consciously documents and re-appropriates the broken timelines and nonsensical sequences of unconscious images that constitute dreams by correlating them with the open and adaptive structure of comic books. In the Blake/Boring series he mimics the stylized bodies and fantasy world of the pre-Romantic artist William Blake and 1950’s silver age superhero comic style of Wayne Boring, a leading Superman artist of his youth. Like the inward looking, imaginary trajectory of Blake, Shaw’s feverish exposure of representational histories and pseudo-worlds are charged with a mystical, dream-like subtext. Still informing his current practice are two interrelated bodies of work from the 1990s, Dream Drawings and Dream Objects that in a self-referential, critical approach to the history of surrealism, draw from his own dream diaries. Spanning over 10 years, these were rendered in a sequential narrative, resembling storyboards.
Exhibition runs through to January 7th, 2014
Simon Lee Gallery
304, 3F The Pedder Building
12 Pedder Street
Central, Hong Kong
