Ernest Shaw

Renewal & Entropy

Ernest Shaw will be exhibiting work from several recent series at ArtSee in Hudson, N.Y from April 6 through June 8, 2024. Shaw has been an artist for the past 6 decades, and has had numerous shows nationally, in galleries and a dozen museums throughout the country. He will be exhibiting the No-Self series of photo-drawings, an exhibit of which was sponsored by the Center for Photography, Woodstock, NY in 2020, and a current body of sculptures, the Concage Series, which explores the nature of entropy and transformation, based around the modernist form of milk cartons. This series, small in scale compared with Shaw’s large scale earlier public sculpture, are done in concrete, cardboard and bronze. He aims to find the grace and fluidity in entropy, aging and flux, and like all his earlier work engages a sense of how the past resides in the present, and how ‘my own hands and heart, strengths and vulnerabilities, tenacity of age and abiding, are kneaded into their changing form, caught in a moment, like bones in a leap.”

The No-Self series are as much concerned with how we see as they are with what we see. Because nothing can ever be made to stand still, and every moment is in flux, the ideas and concept of a fixed and separate self is a mistaken notion, the ‘ultimate optical delusion of consciousness” as Albert Einstein formulated, and many spiritual and religious teachings, including Buddhism, hold to be the nature very of reality. In developing the images of the No-Self, I build from within, from the emotions, ideas, thoughts and perspectives I ‘see’ through in those moments, and what develops in attending to this becomes an image, a present image for a sense of self knowing, witnessing, and observing. What we see, what is revealed, depends on how we see, and what we pay attention to.

Born 1942, NYC, NY.