Opening Reception Saturday, November 15, 5-8 pm.

Ballet Russes - ballpoint pen and resin over panel

Shane McAdams is an artist, writer, curator, and educator who splits his time between Cedarburg, WI and Brooklyn, NY. His artwork has been exhibited at Allegra LaViola Gallery, Marlborough, Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Scream London, and Artistree in Hong Kong, The Schneider Museum, The Haggerty Museum of Art, The Kohler Art Center, and other venues.

Shane has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Marian University and University of Wisconsin. His curatorial projects have been reviewed in the New York Times and The Village Voice. In addition to writing, painting, and curating, he is also a partner in REAL TINSEL, an art space on the Southside of Milwaukee.

One of the great things about working on an art practice for three decades is that you eventually lose sight of what else you might do. Of alternatives and counternarratives. When you’re young, one makes aspirational decisions about what their work might or should be and what it means relative to other art in the world. At some point though, such thoughts disappear. You become snow blind to everything else, and you just start chasing a thing that slowly creeps in over time, and once it’s there you can’t remember when it wasn’t. I’m there. I have my way, and I have something I’m trying to get at, and every moment in the studio goes to try to arrive at that elusive place that I know is available, that others don’t, and that I probably won’t ever totally arrive at. 

I’m bent on, probably obsessed with, bending the potential of materials to do certain things that I hope will create compositional opportunities that are surprising, weird, uncanny, big and small at the same time. Paintings that are nature charged with luck and good last-second decision making. It’s easy in a way, because I don’t look over my shoulder, but it’s difficult because the horizon is always retreating. But isn’t that the great thing about making art, that it’s always there and not there at once? Kind of like life itself–no one knows the ultimate meaning to it all but are sure in certain moments about what is special. This exhibition is a selection of moments that I thought were special, for various reasons: fights with stuff, good ideas, magical accidents, and a little bit of foresight that I hope guided all forward with purpose. 

Press release here.