Shannon Estlund: Between Here and There

The Crisp-Ellert Art Museum and Flagler College are pleased to announce “Between Here and There,” an exhibition by Jacksonville-native Shannon Estlund. The exhibition will include a selection of recent paintings alongside a new series of sculpture.  The artist will give a walkthrough of the exhibition on Friday, may 13 at 4pm, and an opening reception will follow, from 5 to 7pm.

Working between painting, sculpture and site-specific installation, Shannon Estlund’s work focuses on the individual’s relationship to place. Employing color, texture and repeated form through abstraction, she is “interested in places and objects that both capture the senses in a direct experiential way, and function as metaphors for archetypal situations. Obstructions, entanglements, clarity and light are all both physical experiences and metaphors for points in our own life story.”

Estlund’s paintings pay particular attention to un-idealized natural places that are “readily accessible but often overlooked — perfectly formed sticks found beside the path; unkempt areas at the edges of suburbs or beside isolated stretches of highway.” The paintings reference these spaces through a combination of lushly saturated color often juxtaposed with works that have a muted, more somber palate. The artist pays equal homage to both the lush growth and decay of the Floridian landscape and to the harsh, winter environment of the Midwest, using abstraction to explore the “underlying emotional content of an object or place,” leaving an opening for the viewer to extract their own interpretation.

Her sculptures bring the world of her paintings into the viewer’s space. The works combine natural with synthetic materials, often with dense, velvety surfaces. As with Estlund’s paintings, the sculptures are referential — objects that exist both within and outside of our awareness; uncanny and yet familiar. Estlund describes her work as occupying spaces, “that are both real and imaginary, that are complex and difficult to move through, and function both as instances of actual sensory experiences and metaphors for decisive moments in everyday life.” Making for a body of work that is at once emotionally substantive and viscerally arresting.