- > other artists
- Rachel Beach
- d*face
- Anthony Micallef
- Mike Shankman
- Tracy Silva Barbosa
- Russell Young
Mike Shankman was born in 1980 in Boulder, Colorado. He graduated with a BA in Global Studies from the UC Santa Barbara. Mike then went on the study art in Florence, Italy. In 2003, Mike co-founded Million Fishes, a live/work arts organization in the Mission District of San Francisco. He now lives in Brooklyn and works full-time as an artist.
The collection seen here is exclusive to Shift Art Gallery. These paintings take place in a broken landscape. We are passively observing the aftermath of some cataclysm, its evidence scattered but its causality no longer important. Here, splitting and crumbling structures are quietly overwhelmed by nature and time, their original purposes long expired. This is a sort of modest fantasia in which the artist hopes to pose questions of what is real and what has happened here as we sort through what remains.
Mike’s process involves capturing decrepit structures, abandoned buildings, and empty lots in photographs and sketches, and incorporating these objects and spaces into imaginary environments on canvas. Mike likes to anchor his work in some recognizable space, but tends to improvise from there. For Mike, the work is a way to respond to both physical surroundings and cultural zeitgeist in one continuous methodology. He is generally interested in the way certain landscapes reflect difficult social issues, environmental issues, or the current economic mood. He hopes to address these issues in a nuanced way that is neither didactic nor inaccessible. The landscapes can be powerfully open-ended in this way; neither obvious nor meaningless, they provide spaces for the viewer to inhabit and interpret the significance of what is portrayed and what is absent.
