Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to present One return led to another - Retour Perpétuel, an exhibition of new paintings by Shannon T. Lewis. On view from April 4 to May 25 2024, this show marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in Paris and second solo exhibition with the gallery.
Shannon T. Lewis’s images are continually in a state of becoming. The subjects, though fragmented, are seen stretched across scenes or caught in a moment before movement; shared among them is an air of quiet intensity. The fragmented body remains an active one–made possible through the artist’s uses of collage before translating the image to paint. Rarely depicted in full bodily form, the appendages of each subject are rendered emerging from, or surrendering within an alternate scene which contrasts their present reality. Domestic architectural elements become portals of the artist’s own making, encouraging one to question their relation to the subject: whether former, aspirational, or actual. Regardless, the artist says, “we wouldn’t recognize the future if we saw it.”
Through collage and the convergence of image and form, Lewis creates works which disrupt the linearity of temporality. Sifting through many years of accumulated images—some captured by the artist herself and some gathered from literary sources—she conjures the past, thrusting it forward upon our arrival. She manages to, as Homi K. Bhabha has said, “...[not] turn back in time, but fast forward the past…” to our present moment as our eyes reunite with iconography that we may have long left behind. The result is a body of work which slyly traverses through the planes of past, present and future, finding home at their intersection.
The repetition of imagery across some of the works suggests a deja-vu, as if to flirt with temporality–distracting it from producing a linear and sensical narrative. For some, repetition is reinforcement, but for Lewis, it is a methodology of disruption; as is an averted gaze, the centrality of the back of the body, and the inclusion of grayscale. Such mechanisms of refusal are an intentional enactment of subversion within painterly forms, both in the composition and in relation to its viewer. While paintings have historically functioned as a site of image making which centralizes its subject's frontal plane and offers revelation at every turn, Lewis’s work prioritizes its subject by encouraging it to turn inward. Their performances are not one for the viewer, but rather for themselves and amongst themselves. We begin to bear witness to a conversation and choreography which occurs across diptychs and across the gallery thus requiring of us a slowness in pace, in aid of our collective reading and revelation.
In this exhibition, every image exists in relation to another. Just as, for the artist, every migratory shift resulted in clarity of herself and her lineage. With roots in Trinidad, Lewis moved from Toronto to London, then Berlin, causing her to explore questions such as ‘what propels movement across space’ and ‘how can one be both rooted and becoming, simultaneously?’ Lewis responds to her own inquisitions through this exhibition and generates a path forward for us all to follow suit. As the title suggests, actions seen in one composition creates the energy which prompts a response in another composition. One return led to another - Retour Perpétuel renders usage of the cyclical, the regenerative, and the disruptive to question the centrality of home and ways of belonging amidst an increasingly migratory world.
Text written by writer and curator Jenée-Daria Strand, on the occasion of the exhibition.
