Shawne Major: Love Calls Us To the Things of This World
April 11, 2009 - June 16, 2009

Irvine Contemporary is pleased to announce the first Washington, DC solo exhibition of Shawne Major, Love Calls Us To the Things of This World. Shawne Major's exciting post-pop, found-object tapestries were recently exhibited in the Prospect.1 New Orleans Biennial, curated by Dan Cameron. Love Calls Us To the Things of This World presents the artist's love of materials and her creative impulse to fashion objects of arresting wonder and beauty from seemingly mundane objects.

Equally conversant in the main traditions of assemblage art since early modernism and the folk art traditions of the American South, Shawne Major creates works that seem like magical spaces created from the artist’s re-enchantment of objects and materials from disposable production. Unlike quilts and tapestries from either folk art or high craft traditions, her works are remix tableaux with a three-dimensional materiality. No surface, but a density of objects. Each work is a material record of the artist’s process, revealing the sewn and stitched layers of its own making.

Shawne Major fabricates works of American “vernacular beauty,” in Dave Hickey’s phrase, works that reassemble scattered fragments our great democratic and commercial carnival and that attempt to keep intact all the pagan excesses banned from official culture.  She is working at a moment when we’re immersed daily in massive flows of information and competing media content, and when the dominant image of the global consumer economy is a mega-mall of disposable objects engineered for obsolescence.

Shawne Major’s compositions are about the human condition at our historical moment, about art making as still connected to ritual, fetish, the handmade object, and the struggle with chaos, about answering the volumes of discarded consumerist objects with a personal levee against the flow. Her works are, finally, new expressions of the great inexhaustible American potential for democratic subversion just when we need it the most.

Shawne Major has her MFA from Rutgers University and now lives and works in the New Orleans area. She received grant awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2008. See the artist's page for examples of works and artist's resume.

Catalogue published by Irvine Contemporary with essay by Martin Irvine.