Statement

I trace moments of blindness, assumption, and preconceived beliefs. When I get tempted to view life in black and white, I challenge the idea that we live in a stark and certain world. My artistic practice is born from the blurry and confusing cross-sections of living in relation to others and history. 

Often painting with watercolor on paper, and oils on unstretched canvas, I allow the work to remain flexible. Loosely rendered portraits reflect not only their subjects, but what's obscured behind them - what's hidden over their shoulder. Figures feel present, but refuse to fully arrive, searching to locate a personal, collective, and social ghost that resists comprehension. Spray-painted sea and sky-scapes provide pause, while still exploring rich places of unknowing.  I ground the work in time with writing on plein air postcards, using pressed flowers, photographs, and newspaper clippings, like snapshots of a moment. Fragile and unstable materials are pieced together like a collective history. These preservations act as odd companions to paintings, offering something relational as a way to consider contradictions between societal and environmental conditioning. I'm captivated by, and endlessly exploring how this conditioning affects people on an individual level. 

I seek moments when clarity would provide great relief. Catching quick glimpses of such fleeting clarity is possible when pausing to focus, and allowing oneself to feel what has been unconsciously overlooked. These moments of distant witnessing find and pass me quickly, as if I'm riding a speeding train - able to focus my gaze for only a moment as I look out the window.

Bio

Shaw Osha (b. 1962, Baltimore) is an artist working in painting, collage and writing. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in Brooklyn, Louisville, Chapel Hill, and across Washington.  She has been an artist-in-residence at Virginia Center for Creative Art, VA, Centrum, Port Townsend, WA, and Greenwoods 58, Norfolk, CT. She earned a BS from Columbia University and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Osha was raised in New York City and lives between there and Olympia, WA, where she is a visual arts professor at The Evergreen State College. Her work considers how social and historical conditioning impacts individual lives. She investigates human relations, aloneness, difference, love, and suffering through painting. She often paints from photographic reference and stills from YouTube videos, using oils, watercolor, and spray paint, alongside materials such as preserved flowers, maps, and newspaper clippings. Most recently, her work has taken shape as a self-published artist book, a physical, printed assemblage of her long-term project that reflects on the affects of racialized history.

CV

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© All images and writing on this site and their copyrights are owned by Shaw Osha unless otherwise stated.
Images and texts are not to be reprinted, reproduced or reused without the expressed permission of Shaw Osha.