Shannon Wright

Lives and works in San Jose, CA, USA

Artist statement

My intention is to create sculptures that summon, or accommodate, a range of possible stories over their lifetimes. In recent years, I've built structures that suggest hybrids of street furniture, playground equipment, and other modular, mass-produced industrial objects. For example, the purpose of the 22 foot-long structure called Holding Pattern (2017,) is unclear, but it resembles a shopping-cart corral and might suggest an unending cycle of consumption. I aimed to anticipate an imaginary "hindsight” by creating an abandoned artifact of a culture that celebrated excess. The common thread in much of my work is nostalgia for the tangible and the particular, in opposition to the virtual and the abstract. Several of my recent projects are a response to the modernist prioritization of pure economic utility, which has led to the emergence of non-places or atopias disconnected from geography and history. My upcoming work is partly inspired by the field of material culture and its poetic intersections with animism.

Artwork