SHANNON WRIGHT: Hypothetical Sculptures

SHANNON WRIGHT: Hypothetical Sculptures

May 3 - 31, 2024 

ADA Gallery is pleased to present Shannon Wright: Hypothetical Sculptures, her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Shannon Wright is a sculptor and installation artist based in San José, California. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Wright grew up chiefly in Sydney, Australia, and then spent her formative years as an artist among the iron trestle bridges and abandoned turn-of-the-last-century hydroelectric power plants and foundries of Richmond, Virginia. 

Wright earned her BFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University and her MFA in Time Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a Professor of Spatial Art at San Jose State University, and a four-year Artist in Residence at the Cubberley Artist Studio Program in Palo Alto, California. Wright has been represented by ADA Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, since 2005.

Wright’s work has been recognized by numerous awards, including multiple California State University Research Grants in 2017, 2015, 2011, and 2006, the Silicon Valley Creates SV Laureates Award, and two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships. Her work has been featured in publications such as Hi Fructose and Hyperallergic, and she has given lectures at UMass Amherst, San José State University, and Kuvataideakatemia, the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, among others.

In the past decade, Wright has been creating her own "ruins" and monuments, in reaction to a society whose mercantile logic never ceases to disorient her. Wright puts forth fictitious products that might appear to have been government-issued or sold by Home Depot, and subsequently allowed to fall into a state of neglect. With these objects she mourns the erosion of regional cultural identities and the rise of big-box ubiquity.

"Often an idea distills and recombines with other ideas for several years before I commit to building it. Once I have committed, a large sculpture or installation can easily take me two years to complete. During the first part of the COVID-19 pandemic, when I had no access to a wood shop, I finally achieved a longtime goal of teaching myself the rudiments of a 3D modeling program. I found the process of creating 3D models to be rather addictive, and more immediately rewarding than the painstaking fabrication of physical sculptures. Occasionally I have also drawn myself into the scenes; this turns the sculpture’s parts into props in a theatrical set. These props are less complicated than the contraptions in my earlier kinetic work, and I like the idea that perhaps “I” am appearing more for scale than as a “performer.” And yet, it also feels like a beleaguered, peripheral action-figure is beginning to quietly emerge.

Maybe I am building up an archive of scenes that I am obligated to build in real material as soon as time allows. But of course, then I can’t appear in the sculptures–or at least, only briefly. I feel that my constant struggle to find “the right medium” for any piece is itself an integral part of my process and my work. As my collection of hypothetical sculptures grows, they also grow on me as artworks in their own right."

-Shannon Wright

Rubric Series (Sculptures for the Evaluation of Sculpture) I modeled the first hypothetical sculptures of an upcoming series called Rubric: Sculptures for the Evaluation of Sculpture. Although each box began as a satirical device for “evaluating” tabletop-sized sculptures, each began to drift away from its practical use and came to exemplify the particular concept or virtue (no matter how dubious) that it purported to assess. The series began as a tongue-in-cheek response to academia’s focus on “measurable learning outcomes.” I am a relatively late adopter of detailed grading rubrics– perhaps because sculpture, as a category, strikes me as essentially immune to quantitative assessment. I cringe as I guiltily acknowledge that rubrics now make my life simpler even as they replace nuance and complexity with simplistic formulas. In December, 2021 and again in July 2022, I invested countless hours designing and modeling Rubric: Hours Invested. With its cacophony of stopwatch dials, Hours Invested makes a nod to the Time and Motion efficiency studies from the turn of the last century. In May through July, 2022, I designed and modeled Rubric: Effort. The effort applied to create this image was phenomenal. This device will, I am certain, assign itself an “A+” for effort. The Rubric series alludes, in an absurdly low-tech way, to current dialogues surrounding artificial intelligence. The project also lightheartedly explores the ongoing conundrum of the value–or lack thereof–of labour-intensive process in art.