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Stan Shellabarger’s performances, works on paper, prints and artist books employ alternative drawing methods, addressing the body and the Earth to create minimal abstract objects. He takes everyday activities ¬— walking and writing, sometimes breathing —to extreme measures in endurance-based performance work. The repetition of the activity leads to massive accumulations of marks, recording discrete units of time and space that amplify traces humans leave on the Earth; repetition is necessary so that these extremely subtle marks emerge as visible artistic interventions.
Together with collaborator and husband Dutes Miller, they explore physicality, duality, time and romantic ideal in their multidisciplinary work – performance, photography, artists books, sculpture and cut paper silhouettes – that documents the rhythms of human relationships, speaking both to common experiences of intimacy as well as the specifics of queer identities. Their performances, always enacted together in public, push simple materials and actions to almost Sisyphean extremes. Their gestures shift between moments of togetherness and separation, private and public, protection and pain, and visibility and invisibility. Their work is both autobiographical and metaphorical, speaking to common human interaction and queer relationships. Silhouettes of each other, their iconic beards, and their bodies appear regularly in their work. In their signature ongoing performance, “Untitled (Pink Tube)”, a non-theatrical, durational piece, they simultaneously crochet at opposite ends of a long tube of pink acrylic yarn, a metaphorically-loaded object that both unites and separates them. In “Untitled (Grave)”, Miller & Shellabarger dig two holes close together, deep and large enough for each man to lie in. They then dug a small tunnel between the holes that enabled them to hold hands while lying in the graves.
In Collection:
Amherst College
CosmologyLaguna College of Art + Design
UntitledNewberry Library
Coffee Book, 1/25/20 – 8/30/2020Trinity College
Smash Can BookUniversity of California, Irvine (UCI)
CosmologyUniversity of Connecticut (UCONN)
CosmologyUniversity of Southern California (USC)
Smash Can Book