Shanna Glawson

The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Love Stories

Reception for the Artist February 14th from 5pm - 7pm

  Art is my favorite form of expression and an extension of myself. My art plays on the ideas of love, sorrow, hope, enlightenment, and fetish eroticism while maintaining a genuine complexity of irony.  Therefore, my sculptures tend to lie in an ambiguous borderland between sacred and profane. Through art I am able to connect to the passion and pain that resides in my heart and express it in a manner that tends to be both dark and humorous.

I was literally born with a broken heart; a condition called Wolff Parkinson White Syndrome. When I was twenty-one years old I had cardiac ablation surgery and was left with three physical scars on my heart.  Despite being left with these physical scars, it seems that the emotional scars left on my heart from past experiences are far more painful and enduring. It is for this reason that I am fascinated by heart iconography. Because the physical heart is an empty vessel that is meant to be filled with blood, it is easy for the viewer to imagine metaphysical hearts being empty vessels to be filled with spiritual qualities. My art emphasizes the physical and metaphysical by using both the anatomical heart and cordiform shape in the third dimension. I have combined Christian and Gothic themes with other cultural and religious heart connotations to create a more universal language of the heart and the many ways love can be experienced. The range of emotions conveyed are not strictly meant to be funny nor tragic; but perhaps, upon further inspection behind these analogies we might find a deeper meaning and thus celebrate love in all its many conditions.