Shannon Cahalane

About the Artist

—— Drawing and Painting

Shannon Cahalane is a graduating senior in the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at the University of New Hampshire, Durham. With a concentration in drawing and painting, her passion rests in exploring an ever-expanding definition of collage. A minor in Sociology informs the synthesis of different media, which is further intrigued by the materiality of different types of paper and how their printed images decay and evolve through a physically intense creative process. The words “chaos”, “glut”, and “ambiguity” are often on her mind as she creates her own curated universes, which coax viewers to question and unfold their own interpretive experience both in and more importantly, out of, the gallery.


As the amorphous forms that I make become increasingly physical, I find liberty diverging from the original meanings of source materials. The fragments of media act as puzzle pieces of both collective and individual identity.


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Artist’s Statement

I create in acts of destruction: the destruction of material, category, and expectation. In an age of dystopian forecasts and evaporating imagination, this is the only thing that feels like truth. Reconstructing mass-produced commodities, such as print media, and pushing its malleability through assemblage allows me to build a tangible connection to the world outside of my abstract compositions. Using collage in this sense helps me to cope with my shame surrounding consumerism. It is appealing due to its sustainability, accessibility, and feeling of resilience due to its recombinant processes.

I use the immediacy of collage to connect with my body through both scale and surface. I need to scrape and rub and rip and feel the wet grime and glue under my nails. As the amorphous forms that I make become increasingly physical, I find liberty diverging from the original meanings of source materials. The fragments of media act as puzzle pieces of both collective and individual identity. Topographic-like surfaces become a mapping of my universe. The ability to build a surface, cover it up, and rearrange media within collage often feels like a metaphor for how I form my own identity within a global and consumer culture.

Drawing on my work enhances its psychological nature and allows me to better reference the figure and natural world. These marks are graphic, visceral, and impulsive- meant to break up what is expected and cause eyes to linger. Such direct integration of personal expression is meant to slow down interpretive processing in a culture where sensory overload has become the norm.

Dadaism and Rauschenberg’s idea of the space between art and life are philosophies that have been of great inquiry to me, as well as Kurt Switcher’s “Merz- pictures” which play off the German word for commerce. Whether it is paper scrap pasted, and a bit of charcoal put to page or a fresh entity off the production line, we are but further falsifying our notion of permanence while pushing the planet closer to extinction.

This is a self-portrait, a desperate attempt at reflection.

This is a brewing and spewing mirage.