Gwen Shockey The Continuation of Life

April 3 – 27, 2014

Opening reception, Friday, April 4th from 6 to 9PM

Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present The Continuation of Life, the first solo exhibition of member Gwen Shockey. Utilizing a combination of needlework and drawing on paper, Shockey explores queer eroticism and the pursuit for structure in love and desire using fairy tales, myths and other stories from her childhood as complex templates for moral and bodily etiquette.

In The Continuation of Life, Shockey draws attention to specific moments in these tales which serve as her inspiration or what she terms, “temptation, or the point at which a character engages her body in subversive ways for the sake of curiosity or want.” The exhibition’s recurring theme of the heart and the hands is representative of the relationship between the physical body and its actions, while the use of thread and graphite emphasizes the simultaneous tenderness and intensity that accompany our notions and experiences of eroticism.

Shockey graduated with honors from Connecticut College and has earned many awards and fellowships, including the Leo and Ann Higdon Purchase Award, and the Marguerite Hanson Art Grant. Shockey has exhibited nationally and participated in residencies at the Haystack Mountain School in Maine and Elsewhere Studios in Colorado and was recently profiled in The Huffington Post. She maintains an active studio and curatorial practice in her home city of Brooklyn, New York.

Images from left to right: Inner Castle, graphite on paper, 2013; She Loves Her (Not), thread on paper, dimensions variable, 2013; Psyche and Cupid, 125th and Broadway, graphite on paper, 2013