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# Elaine Stocki – The Palms (Works)
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![Elaine Stocki – The Palms - Nudes Moving an Abstract Painting 1, 2013. Silver gelatin print, part of triptych,
edition of 5 (+2 AP), 25 x 20 in.![Elaine Stocki – The Palms - Nudes Moving an Abstract Painting 1, 2013. Silver gelatin print, part of triptych,
edition of 5 (+2 AP), 25 x 20 in.
![Elaine Stocki – The Palms - Nudes Moving an Abstract Painting 2, 2013. Silver gelatin print, part of triptych,
edition of 5 (+2 AP), 20 x 25 in.![Elaine Stocki – The Palms - Nudes Moving an Abstract Painting 2, 2013. Silver gelatin print, part of triptych,
edition of 5 (+2 AP), 20 x 25 in.
![Elaine Stocki – The Palms - Nudes Moving an Abstract Painting 3, 2013. Silver gelatin print, part of triptych,
edition of 5 (+2 AP), 25 x 20 in.![Elaine Stocki – The Palms - Nudes Moving an Abstract Painting 3, 2013. Silver gelatin print, part of triptych,
# Selected Works
[Nudes Moving an Abstract Painting 1, 2013. Silver gelatin print, part of triptych,
edition of 5 (+2 AP), 25 x 20 in. ![Nudes Moving an Abstract Painting 1, 2013. Silver gelatin print, part of triptych,
edition of 5 (+2 AP), 25 x 20 in.![Nudes Moving an Abstract Painting 1, 2013. Silver gelatin print, part of triptych,
[Nudes Moving an Abstract Painting 2, 2013. Silver gelatin print, part of triptych,
edition of 5 (+2 AP), 20 x 25 in. ![Nudes Moving an Abstract Painting 2, 2013. Silver gelatin print, part of triptych,
edition of 5 (+2 AP), 20 x 25 in.![Nudes Moving an Abstract Painting 2, 2013. Silver gelatin print, part of triptych,
[Nudes Moving an Abstract Painting 3, 2013. Silver gelatin print, part of triptych,
edition of 5 (+2 AP), 25 x 20 in. ![Nudes Moving an Abstract Painting 3, 2013. Silver gelatin print, part of triptych,
edition of 5 (+2 AP), 25 x 20 in.![Nudes Moving an Abstract Painting 3, 2013. Silver gelatin print, part of triptych,
## Elaine Stocki
The Palms
May 29 - June 28, 2014  if ($exhibition\_opening) : ?endif; ?
## Elaine Stocki – The Palms Press Release
Thomas Erben is proud to present the first US solo exhibition of photographer Elaine Stocki (b. 1979, Winnipeg, Canada). Through her unique and formally eloquent images, Stocki highlights the tenuous connection between photography and reality. While invitingly cerebral and layered with art-historical references, the work also resonates on a fundamentally emotional level.
There is something decidedly strange about the imagery of Elaine Stocki. Her large silver gelatin prints are firmly rooted in American photography traditions, but hand-coloring, a decisive formal vocabulary, a juxtaposition of the documentary and the constructed – as well as subject matters veering toward the surreal – make them difficult to pin down, in time as well as in space. Contrary to the idyllic postcard scenes and intimate portraits commonly associated with hand-tinting, Stocki appropriates the technique on an expanded scale, both in terms of size and content. Her photographs seem simultaneously current and dated, uniting the fragmented visual mindset of the present with the elevated “decisive moment” of the past.
The display of snapshot-style documentary material side by side with overtly staged scenes – where the peculiarity of the latter makes us question the truthfulness of the former – casts a shadow of unreality over the entire exhibition. Paradoxically, as many of the photographs are so obviously constructed performances, it is difficult to read them as anything but an accurate documentation of exactly what the artist wants to show us. By crafting scenes as peculiar as these, and using a technique that emphasizes materiality and presents each print as an object in itself, Stocki may have found the only way for a photograph to truly and objectively represent its subject matter.
This becomes especially apparent in the triptych Nudes Moving an Abstract Painting, where three women, as directed by Stocki, maneuver a painting made by the artist in front of her own paint-stained studio wall (referencing, among other things, Yves Klein’s nude model painting performances). The stark contrast between light and animate shadows, the sensuality of the bodies and their outlines set against angular planes, and the perfectly uncomfortable cropping where a tiny sliver of an object may hover right at the edge, all generate a high degree of formal complexity. Combined with intricately composed documentary images like Ellice and the pure surrealism of Albert, this makes for a complex whole, a set of works performing a precarious but precise balance act in the awkward space right in between all the things photography has a potential to be.
Elaine Stocki holds an MFA from **Yale University** (2009) and has been awarded numerous grants including a **Tierney Fellowship** and a **Canada Arts Council Project Grant**. Her work has been exhibited in the US and Canada, and in Germany at the **Deutsche Guggenheim**. In 2011 Stocki’s photography was featured in **TIME Magazine’s Lightbox** as well as published in a monograph by **TBW Books** (Oakland, CA). The artist has been nominated for both the **Grange Prize** (2011) and the **Sobey Art Award** (2012). In 2014, she will be in residence at the **Mountain School of Arts**(Los Angeles). Stocki’s work is included in the permanent collection of the **Philadelphia Museum of Art**.
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# Shanna Waddell – (it’s like) roadside stuffed animals (Works)
![Shanna Waddell – (it’s like) roadside stuffed animals - River Phoenix - Light Vehicle, 2013. Oil, spray paint, glow in the dark paint, and glitter on canvas,
73.5 x 93 in.![Shanna Waddell – (it’s like) roadside stuffed animals - River Phoenix - Light Vehicle, 2013. Oil, spray paint, glow in the dark paint, and glitter on canvas,
73.5 x 93 in.
73.5 x 93 in. (detail)![Shanna Waddell – (it’s like) roadside stuffed animals - River Phoenix - Light Vehicle, 2013. Oil, spray paint, glow in the dark paint, and glitter on canvas,
73.5 x 93 in. (detail)
[River Phoenix - Light Vehicle, 2013. Oil, spray paint, glow in the dark paint, and glitter on canvas,
73.5 x 93 in. ![River Phoenix - Light Vehicle, 2013. Oil, spray paint, glow in the dark paint, and glitter on canvas,
73.5 x 93 in.![River Phoenix - Light Vehicle, 2013. Oil, spray paint, glow in the dark paint, and glitter on canvas,
73.5 x 93 in. (detail) ![River Phoenix - Light Vehicle, 2013. Oil, spray paint, glow in the dark paint, and glitter on canvas,
73.5 x 93 in. (detail)![River Phoenix - Light Vehicle, 2013. Oil, spray paint, glow in the dark paint, and glitter on canvas,
## Shanna Waddell
(it's like) roadside stuffed animals
January 9 - February 8, 2014  if ($exhibition\_opening) : ?endif; ?
## Shanna Waddell – (it’s like) roadside stuffed animals Press Release
Thomas Erben is excited to present American painter **Shanna Waddell**’s second solo exhibition, following her well-received show in 2011. In this new group of works, Waddell’s fascination with cults – religious or personal – continues to serve as a vehicle for broader existential themes. These are tough paintings, which Karen Rosenberg, in a New York Times review, assessed as forging a “confident style best described as post-apocalyptic and post-Expressionistic. It’s hallmarks are radioactive colors, corrupted sterile and spiritual imagery, and sheer painterly bravura.”
In Waddell’s 2011 exhibition, we were introduced to a private iconography of floating shapes and spaces, garishly colored coffins and cabinets. Continuing in the same vein, her new paintings introduce the blackness of an undefined outer-space-like void, while still retaining much of the same intensity in color. The artist uses a wide variety of painterly techniques and materials, contrasting vaporous clouds of spray paint with gleaming metal leaf and wrapping paper, and brushwork alternating between flowing and decisive.
In *( it’s like ) roadside stuffed animals,* Waddell takes on the subject matter of River Phoenix, with his connection to The Children of God, and Kurt Cobain, who, though not himself a cult member, has been the subject of a cult-like following both in life and death. Painting them in what she calls “light vehicles” – square, moving spaces with bright, stylized wheels – Waddell resurrects these individuals, creating memorials, like painted versions of the improvised roadside altars often found along the highway where accidents have recently occurred.
One fundamental theme in Waddell’s work is the unraveling of beauty, the entropy that corrupts even – or maybe especially – the most righteous and lofty ideals. A cult lets the end justify the means and turns to violence in its pursuit of paradise. A rock star finds no solace in the glory of stardom, and ends his life in drugs and suicide. As an ultimate symbol for this dynamic, the artist utilizes the figure of Satan, once the most beautiful of angels, turned into the opposite. Waddell paints her Satan as a vague conglomeration of expressions and body parts: a manifold presence hovering in empty space trying to figure out which shoes, or legs, to wear – as in *Untitled (Satan)* – or a silvery idol traveling in a light vehicle of his own, resplendent but headless, in *Light Vehicle (Satan)*. He serves as a reminder of the flaw present in the midst of beauty, and the essential mystery behind all existence.
Shanna Waddell (b. 1981, Long Beach, CA) received her MFA from **Tyler School of Art** (2010) and a BFA from **California State University Long Beach** (2006). She lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.