Ex-Voto — Owen Pratt

Ex-Voto takes its name from ancient offerings used by various communities throughout human history, primarily intended to ward off illness and danger. While in her mid-twenties, Shaan was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and her experiences with treatment and recovery became the foundation of her artistic practice, sparking a long and ongoing exploration of the interplay between internal and external states, generation and decay, the body and the natural world, and illness and healing. After entering remission, Shaan relocated to Montagne Noire in southern France with her partner, Owen. There, the couple developed a growing interest in a near-by rock quarry once used for lithography. As such, Ex-Voto imagines the human body as a rock quarry (as well as other natural landscapes), where bodily systems are examined alongside organic processes of deposition, transformation, and extraction.

The exhibition is inspired by an expansive concept of living entities and material animism, where quarries become bodies, organs transform into landscapes, and paintings pulse, hum, and vibrate, sustained by a living biological film. The artists seek to dissolve the boundaries between living and nonliving, body and environment.

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