"Stass Shpanin was born in Azerbaijan, formerly the Soviet Union, and has lived in the US since he was a teenager, so he is no stranger to countries and ideologies coming and going, and the imagery associated with them transforming along the way. Images of birds, animals and plants have appeared in the insignia, fl ags and offi cial documents of many states and municipalities for millennia, their meanings often similar yet adjusted to a particular context."
"The creators of fraktur were commissioned by their communities to illustrate birth and baptism certifi cates and other offi cial records. They freely combined text and image, and often exercised liberty with colors and scale in their compositions exuding humor and joie de vivre. Perhaps the work of these artists, who were so imaginative and irreverent while constructing their clients' histories via pictorial means, can stand in for a parody of the imagery of state offi cialdom, a similarly arbitrary selection of symbols produced with less innocuous purposes."
"PLATO is thrilled to announce Stass Shpanin's solo exhibition, Forbidden Garden, on view through October 4. The Philadelphia-based artist Stass Shpanin focuses on interpretations and fabrications of the past that reverberate in the present. His hand-painted canvases combine centuries-old American folk imagery with AI technology to deconstruct the vocabulary of myth-making and examine the visual mechanisms aff ecting public memory."
Forbidden Garden presents hand-painted canvases that merge centuries-old American folk imagery with AI technology to interrogate myth-making and public memory. The artist draws inspiration from fraktur, illuminated works made by German immigrants in Pennsylvania between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries, and from archetypal animal and plant symbols used in insignia, flags, and official documents. Fraktur creators combined text and image with playful color and scale while illustrating vital records. The artist digitally fragments chosen fraktur examples, repeats and recombines those elements, then translates them into hand-painted compositions that expose the mechanisms and objectives behind symbolic state imagery. The exhibition runs through October 4 at PLATO.
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