Shan Turner-Carroll | Bodies on a rock

October 10 2020 — November 15 2020

Bodies On A Rock is an exhibition of existing and new works by local artist Shan Turner-Carroll. Turner-Carroll’s practice documents the multiplicity of connections between body and landscape. Site-specificity is key to this, not only as a premise for the work but also in how an embodied methodology unfolds around each site and location it is presented.

Sun, Moon Walk I, 2015 was a performative gesture where the artist followed the sun and moon with a mirror through the streets of New York City on a 24-hour personal pilgrimage. In its manifestation at MRAG, transformation and play overlay documents from the walk and relics of studio excavations from the same period.

Bodies On A Rock, present moving images and sculptures produced in 2016 during an artist-in-residence program in the regional Icelandic town of Seyðisfjörður. Surrounded by mountains, black waterfalls and green skies, Turner-Carrol lived and worked with the experimental art community at LungA School. The work explores the artist’s encounter with an unfamiliar, sometimes alien, landscape. It foregrounds the body as a subjective site of perception and indeed a landscape of its own, offering alternatives to existing colonial visions of land and the blueprints that lay within assumptions of reality.

Turner-Carroll embodies the role of trickster, traveller, and pilgrim. It is through common gestures, or everyday acts, that he builds his language and conjures a form of magic. The collection of images, objects and moments presented here sits within a larger constellation of ideas being explored across times, sightings, ponderings, endurances and sites.

shanturnercarroll.com