Jo Shane

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

Since the late 1970s, my practice has positioned the body as both epistemic instrument and biopolitically contested terrain. Working within an evolving feminist and materialist lineage, I conceive of the corporeal as a durational infrastructure as well as as a living site through which creative labor bears witness against the capitalized access to vitality and health. The disintegrity of the body, its preservation and its mortality, have remained continuous throughlines in my work, foregrounding my specific subjecthood as both maker and medium. For nearly five decades, the human aggregate, registering how the physical self operates in the world, moves through the contemporary life cycle, and absorbs its evolving pressures, has been tantamount to my daily inquiry. While many artists extend their practices toward the speculative or posthuman, my focus remains with the living and perishable self on this side of the evolutionary threshold: the somatic in the linked terms of its senescence and survival. My work is therefore anchored in the tensions between vitality and decline, autonomy and dependency, control and surrender. This is, by nature, self-reflexive. I engage the rhetorics of self-optimization and longevity through lived experience, with a specific focus attendant to aging, hormonal modulation, psychopharmaceutical dependency, motherhood, reproductive history, and mental health. Through this first-hand perspective, I examine the specters of unequal privilege and...

Artwork