Ghost Stories

Also on view in The Skirt: Winnie Sidharta "Boundless" Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Ghost Stories, a two-person exhibition featuring recent work by Norm Paris and Mark Shetabi, curated by Ortega y Gasset Projects Co-Director Lauren Whearty. Ghost Stories presents Paris’ and Shetabi’s investigations into the inexplicable, the ghostly, and the ominous. Their works access viewer’s experiences of the familiar, transforming it into a haunting encounter. Norm Paris’ large-scale graphite drawings and plaster sculptures show the material and psychological making and unmaking of his athletes. Dynamic poses of figures found on baseball cards become material and psychological investigations of icons and relics from the past as they look toward the future. Mark Shetabi’s sculptures based on movie theaters and monster films frame our view with computer privacy screens, evoke both distant and intimate space, as one discovers their eerie charms from a very close range. The play of scale in both artists' work between the monumental and the miniscule flips our expectations of both epic and intimate. Story and history converge and resurface as images and forms are unearthed through material processes, selected subjects, and obstructed views. Each artist’s work is alive and in a constant state of flux, where the viewer feels the residue of the artist’s process of making, unmaking, reframing, and editing. Norm Paris (New York, NY) is from Cleveland, Ohio. He creates sculptures, drawings, and mixed-media works that explore his complicated relationship to popular culture of the recent past, focusing on objects, iconography, and mythology that alternately aggrandize and diminish historical figures over time. Paris re-envisions once heroic figures as relics, ruins, and absences. Bygone icons of once-celebrated athletes and musicians sourced from a mix of personal and public mythologie - are used as vessels to be modeled, covered, crated, or redacted. He alternately renders and obliterates his iconography through labor-intensive processes of drawing, casting, and erasure. Mark Shetabi (Philadelphia, PA) was born in New York, and as a child lived for five years in Tehran, Iran before his family returned to the United States in 1979, on the eve of the Iranian Revolution. The experience of straddling two cultures - often in conflict - is an enduring subtext for much of his work. Shetabi’s paintings and sculptures are made with the same materials and tools and as a result, share a skin. Through his work, Shetabi uses representations of familiar subjects to provide a visual access to a subjective and disjointed overview of Iranian and American histories, politics and possible futures. Lauren Whearty (Philadelphia, PA) received her MFA in painting from The Ohio State University where she received a Graduate Teaching Associate Award, an Arts and Humanities Research Grant, and was nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. She received her BFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, with honors. While attending Tyler, Lauren received the Ellen Battell Stoeckel fellowship to attend Yale’s Summer School of Art residency in Norfolk, CT. She has attended Vermont Studio Center with a fellowship, and has exhibited at such venues as the Woodmere Museum of Art in Philadelphia, The Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia, Vox Populi, Satellite Contemporary. Lauren has taught at The Ohio State University, Tyler School of Art, University of the Arts, and Hussian College of Art. Lauren is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Lehigh University.