Paintings by Sabrina Shah on surfaces by Shane Bradford
Trespass is an unusual collaboration between Union curator Shane Bradford and painter Sabrina Shah. The project is intended to test the jurisdiction of creative authorship in a traditional gallery setting. While these works are firmly Shah’s painting, the fact that they have been painted on top of abandoned former works by Bradford defines the series. Doubts arise. Questions are posed: what does it mean to trespass? Where is the consent?
To all these queries there is only one reliable response: the exhibition itself. A complex curatorial conundrum has been initiated, the outcome of which is visible in the actual event of the exhibition experience. If there are answers, they reside within the dynamism of Shah’s brushstrokes and the inherent surprise of the unpremeditated symbiosis between the protagonists.
Shah’s spontaneous, unfiltered, and immediate paint-handling is supported by the show’s context, allowing for the event to remain in progress. The imagery often depicts participatory social happenings to which the viewer is invited. The result is a gloriously
jarring and unexpected extension of Shah’s painterly psycho-dramatic fiction.
Shah has a history of reworking her older paintings. The previous layers and scars are important. This time, however, her imagery responds to the incomplete narrative threads of Bradford’s beginnings’. Suggestive traces of basketball courts, road traffic barriers, and abandoned train tracks are picked-up on and answered with animals, characters, toys, and games. 1,2,3.
First, second, and third. Is anybody winning?
While Bradford’s backgrounds perform the dual role of story and substrate to provide an authentic foundation for Shah’s primary interventions, an intimate yet delightfully unstable bond is formed. Despite the literal cover-up there is no hiding; the uncertain friction between object and ground makes for an atmosphere of palpable vitality. There’s a raw honesty in the dynamic fusion of the paintings that perfectly platforms Shah’s naturally expressive and distinctive idiosyncrasies.