Published on June 05, 2020

Blake Shirley

"The primary motive for my work is a meditation on the passage of time. The work bears traces of the slippage and displacement of fading minutes, hours, and days. Like a memory, or a lingering thought stuck on the tip of the tongue, images appear to be on the verge of dissipating or morphing, teetering between recognizability and being forever lost. Ghostlike forms reference ephemeral subject matter such as clouds or shadows, held in place through the act of painting. Images are revealed as fragments in the midst of change, destruction, redefinition, and/or restoration. There is a mixture of both the familiar and the inexorably strange. There are moments of clarity, if only fleeting, with plenty of uncertainty. This transformative or “in-between” state wavers between identifiable and unidentifiable, provoking the notion of change and transformation that inevitably occurs with temporal distance." - Blake Shirley

Blake Shirley lives and works in CT. His works had been exhibited nationally and internationally. Most recently at CICA Museum of Contemporary Art in South Korea, Art Space in Hartford, CT, and Eli Center for contemporary art in New Haven, CT. He has been awarded grants from the Artist Trust Fund, The Connecticut Culture Foundation, and the Working Artist Grant. Additionally, he has been awarded a Joan Mitchell fellowship for a residency at Vermont Studio Center and awarded placement into the Radius program at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.