bio
Sharon Shapiro is a Virginia-based artist with a versatile painting practice. She views painting as a cunning vessel for the tension and insatiable longing that lurk beneath the surface. Working in diverse media and sizes, Shapiro portrays opposing forces in her figurative-based work: fantastic and natural, utopian and dystopian subject matter.
Shapiro has shown throughout the United States, including one and two-person exhibitions at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, NYC; the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, Arlington, VA; {Poem 88} Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Garvey Simon Projects, NYC; and the Gadsden Museum of Art, Gadsden, AL. Her group exhibitions include the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Maine Center for Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; the McLean Project for the Arts, McLean, VA; and the Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, LA. She has been in residence at Ucross, Jentel, Ragdale, The Hambidge Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her practice has received grant support, including two awards from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and she was the recipient of the Atelier Focus Fellowship at AIR SFI in Georgia. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, Whitewall, Art Spiel, Studio Visit, The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Kolaj Magazine. Shapiro holds an MFA from the Maine College of Art and a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art. She currently lives and works in Charlottesville, VA.
statement
My work delves into the intricacies of female identity and the multi-faceted experience of growing up in the American South. I examine the impact of this culture on female pleasure and leisure, exploring nostalgia, memory, and womanhood. I collaborate with my models to create source images that evoke their feminine agency. By collaging these photos with disparate images from my personal archives, I place these figures in semi-imaginary realms, often weaving together bucolic imagery with an urban vernacular to heighten a feeling of a world off-kilter.
Nostalgia is a cautionary muse, challenging viewers to disentangle the threads of myth from the fabric of history, which provokes a critical exploration of these roles in broader cultural narratives. Dominated by vivid colors and airbrushed graffiti, my palette conjures femininity and feminism, weather maps, raging forest fires, and record-setting heat waves. In the face of climate catastrophe and threats to women's autonomy, I am interested in capturing my subjects' vulnerability and strength, highlighting intimacy and camaraderie as safeguards against the most pressing issues of our time. The settings of my paintings often portray a tension between nature and culture, playing with these ideas as a metaphor for the tensions of adolescence. I counterpose the placidness of domestic spaces with uncanny incursions from the outside world – livestock, overgrowth, wild animals. Wildness/wilderness are ideas that inform our narratives about the natural world and human development. My layered representations of women offer a world where time converges and collapses, questioning existing systems and advocating for cultural shifts.