Wrapped in Meaning

exhibit description

For Wrapped in Meaning, artists Annalee Schorr (CO) and Shelby Shadwell (WY) both create work inspired by metallic Mylar space blankets. Shelby creates large-scale charcoal drawings where the reflective surfaces shimmer and shine and Annalee uses the blankets as her canvases, utilizing the folds in the blankets as a grid to paint and apply duct tape to create patterns referencing quilts and woven textiles.

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AnnaLee Schorr

Artist Statement

My paintings on emergency blankets are based on warmth-giving textiles—Mexican and Guatemalan serapes, Navajo blankets, and traditional quilts. The paintings are meant to remind us of the basic human
need for warmth. Emergency blankets are used in dire situations—at border crossings by refugees and immigrants, by survivors of fires and floods, by homeless people, by anyone needing coverage during unexpected circumstances.
The serape paintings remind us of the refugees trying to cross our southern border, evading border patrols and walls. The traditional quilt paintings evoke the women over the ages who made quilts, usually colorful and imaginative in spite of sad lives and poverty.
Made of aluminized polymer, emergency blankets look fragile, flimsy, and unreliable, but are in fact tough and substantial. Small packets open to a blanket, with a folded-in grid the size of the original package. I utilize this grid in my geometric paintings.

Artist Statement

I make large scale charcoal and pastel drawings of space blankets (aka solar blankets, emergency blankets, thermal blankets, etc.) which are made of a compact lightweight material used to regulate temperatures of things like spacecraft and human bodies in cold circumstances. One might see them packed in a first aid kit for camping or, more poignantly in recent years, wrapped around migrants detained in camps near the border between the US and Mexico. While the material is cheap and rather flimsy, it has a brilliant sparkling appearance reminiscent of precious stones or metals, thus evoking a something like “fool’s gold.” Due to its similarity to material found at the crash site near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, the blankets may also refer to a shared cultural fascination with space travel and the possible existence of extraterrestrial life. The subject also maintains themes from previous bodies of work such as the representation of abstract folds and contours in the material can evoke pareidolia, or the perception of recognizable form in a random conglomeration or formation of things. I maintain an interest in the implications of how the human mind, as a kind of inference engine, seeks to find patterns where they may or may not exist and how that can lead to the proliferation of things like conspiracy theories.