Artist Feature

Sharon Shapiro

TENDER WILD

OPENS MAY  7 // ARTIST RECEPTION THURSDAY, MAY 14, 6 - 9 p.m.

Shapiro’s work examines the gap between society's expectations and a vivid inner life. Through contemporary female experience, she explores the friction between imagination and reality, utopia and dystopia, lightness and discomfort. In collaboration, Shapiro photographs women and translates these images into paintings that revisit formative moments of change through the lens of experience. Positioning women within sites of spectacle, such as museum dioramas or football fields, reveals uneasy thresholds. Posture and expression register the rawness of transformation. Wild animals, staged within the American imagination, mirror depictions of women as both mystical beings and assailable prey. Saturated palettes draw from flags, weather maps, and chakra diagrams, further blending constructed and interior worlds. This blurring holds tension between fragility and defiance as containment falters. At a time of mounting threats to female autonomy and the natural world, these scenes insist on presence, agency, and refusal.