Sana Shaw

Sana Shaw is a mixed media artist who has exhibited throughout the United States and internationally in Italy and Latvia. Recent exhibitions and art fairs include the Florence Biennale, San Francisco Art Fair, multiple shows at Sabine Street Studios Gallery in Houston, CAL International Invitational Show in Conroe, Texas, Miami Art Basel Week, RIGA Art Fair in Latvia, and The Other Art Fair in Dallas. Sana’s awards include prizes and recognition at the Master Mind Award of CFA Institute, WASH Gallery in Houston, and the Madeley Gallery in Conroe, Texas. Her publications include Artist Talk Magazine, Saatchi Art, Artist Close Up Magazine as well as Redfin Blog and Sana’s works remain in private collections throughout the world in the United States, England, Canada, Singapore, Italy, Greece, and Belgium.

Typically employing plaster and casting techniques, Sana creates casts of antique heirlooms and attaches them to the canvas, followed by sculpting cracks and stone-like forms onto the surface. She finishes off these relief-sculptural compositions with heavily saturated paint which leaves a luminous transparency and acts as a delicate dye while still revealing the raw color of the plaster. The paint seeps into the crevices of the cracks within her works, giving off a volcanic effect. Sana sees the cracks and fragmentation in her work as a metaphor for the destructive nature of civilization through extensive military and social crises and collapse. 

The mixed media works often have a haunting feel with the integration of mostly monochromatic plaster with imagery such as skulls and satyrs with sunken eyes. Sana’s art has mythological undertones as if the cracks, pebbles, and fragmentations represent the earth and the symbolism represents titans or gods, much like the titans of Gaia or Prometheus who bend the elements of the earth to their will. The plaster in Sana’s art, sculpted in manners as if the earth were cracking from an earthquake or spewing raw earth from a disruption, has naturalistic implications conveying a volcanic or mountainous aesthetic. 

Whispers of Antiquity (pictured above) reveals Sana’s fascination with iconography. The image of a classically portrayed portrait becomes accentuated against a backdrop of spiraling spew of stone wrapping around and above the figure. The composition becomes surrounded by veiny forms, as if the earth were coming forth to portray and carry the woman portrayed. Whispers of Antiquity suggests to the viewer to reinterpret purpose through surface in regard to symbolic depictions, in such a case, of femininity and classicism.

Sana Shaw uses process to convey natural elements as well as mythological and social metaphors. These fine compositions reveal a steady craft and inclination to express surface and texture as a means of personal expression as well as collective commentary. These psychological portraits need not always be figurative in order to convey Sana’s sense of sociological discourse regarding the fine cracks in the social order, much like the fragmentation in her work. Through a determined mostly monochromatic aesthetic as well as sculpting finely-tuned textures and three-dimensional compositions seeped in elegance and dynamic form, Sana Shaw enhances contemporary design principles, indirect social commentary, historical references, and a unification with nature.

https://sanashaw.com