Stan Shellabarger’s performances, works on paper, prints and artist books employ alternative drawing methods, addressing the body and the Earth to create minimal abstract objects. He takes everyday activities ¬— walking and writing, sometimes breathing —to extreme measures in endurance-based performance work. The repetition of the activity leads to massive accumulations of marks, recording discrete units of time and space that amplify traces humans leave on the Earth; repetition is necessary so that these extremely subtle marks emerge as visible artistic interventions.
Video (2014): Ann Shafer, then the Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs at the Baltimore , describes the art that comes from Stan Shellabarger’s walking performances – feats of endurance that are documented in Untitled, a work that acts as the residue of the performance itself.
Stan Shellabarger has work in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, The National Gallery of Canada and the Newark Public Library. His work has been written about in Art in America, Artforum.com, The Chicago Tribune, Art in Print, Chicago Magazine and ArtSlant. His work has been shown at Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMAC) in Nice, France; MCA Chicago; Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh, North Carolina; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; and he’s been invited to perform at the VOLTA show in Basel, Switzerland; the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland, Oregon; Macy’s downtown department store window during the Looptopia festival in Chicago; Millennium Park in Chicago; Illinois State University in Bloomington, Illinois; The Suburban in Oak Park; and the Center of Contemporary Art in St. Louis. Shellabarger received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and he lives and works in Chicago.