Stephen Shanabrook restlessly works between painful and sweet, death and beauty; melting them together - metaphorically and literally - into one frozen state; one fossil.
In Hopping Hills, The Pharmaceutical Landscape, the artist melts plastic prescription pill bottles and presses them into th... Read more
Stephen Shanabrook restlessly works between painful and sweet, death and beauty; melting them together – metaphorically and literally – into one frozen state; one fossil.
In Hopping Hills, The Pharmaceutical Landscape, the artist melts plastic prescription pill bottles and presses them into the form of Easter bunnies. An installation of running and hopping rabbits made out of hundreds of empty pill vessels suggests that prescription drugs have become the new politic as a result of lost hopes and multiplying disconnections.
In Shanabrook’s sculpture Island Of The Lotus Eaters the viewer is seduced by the beauty of a huge flower, which upon closer examination becomes again, an artifice made of melted drug bottles. On his long journey back home, Odysseus visited the lethargic island of Lotus-Eaters. The lotus fruits and flowers, which were narcotic and addictive, were the primary food of the islanders. The lotus eater’s invited Odysseus’ men to sample the drug causing them to forget about their longing for home, now they only wished to stay and eat more lotus. They no longer desired to take the labyrinthine journey back home – the metaphor of our lives. Shanabrook isn’t a stranger to addiction,he went to hell and back on his own. The artist mixes materials in a non-stop experimental process, which for his addictive personality, is never enough. Shanabrook covers common plastic soldiers in delicious dark chocolate in his new installation Battle of Losers and Lovers. Stacked on each other, the sweet, desirable chocolate drips on the white surface of office tables – an allegory for the everyday working process, dissatisfaction and a loss of self.
In his rather bizarre statement “The Chocolate Soldier or Heroism – The Lost Chord of Christianity” C.T. Studd (1860-1931) wrote “a soldier without heroism is a chocolate soldier! Dissolving in water and melting at the smell of fire, sweeties they are! Bonbons, lollipops! Living their lives in a glass dish or in a cardboard box, each clad in his soft clothing, a little frilled white paper to pre- serve his dear little delicate constitution.” More than a hundred years later I understand that there should be place for all – chocolate soldiers; losers and lovers. Modern society feels like a battlefield and at the end of the day we all want a prize, we want chocolate, we want home. Shanabrook recalls an account of a field medic from the Vietnam War: “He was explaining what he carried with him in his medic’s satchel, these bare necessities included: gauze, morphine, tape, comic books and M&Ms. The candies were for the mortally wounded soldiers, the ones that would never make it to the field hospitals. For these soldiers the candy was a way to satisfy a simple desire – to feel closer to home – before they slipped away into that unknown jungle.” (Veronika Georgieva, 2009)
