Projects and Exhibitions
Love Via Post, a Postcard Project (click to view)
Art sent to your door 💌
2018-current
A direct action gifting project that both endeavors to disrupt and circumnavigate the culture of the commodification of the art object and also acts as a series of small acts of love.
Postcard number 5
https://www.instagram.com/loveviapost/
Everything I Never Told You: Secrets Too Beautiful To Keep (click to view)
September 29-November 20, 2016
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, Gallery 51
Skyline #3
Shelley Chamberlin, 2016
Charcoal on paper
In Everything I Never Told You: Secrets Too Beautiful To Keep, Shelley Chamberlin and Michelle Daly explore themes of vulnerability, intimacy, relationality, nostalgia, memory, disruption, determination, absurdist humor, and hope. As longtime friends, artistic collaborators, and conceptual partners, the two artists have worked in tandem; their artistic trajectories gapping and converging, illuminating spaces and places for each to delve more deeply into their individual inquiries. This exhibition maps these moments, highlighting intersections and commonalities.
“Conversation is the vehicle for change. We test our ideas. We hear our own voice in a concert with another. And inside those pauses of listening, we approach new territories of thought. A good argument, call it a discussion, frees us. Words fly out of our mouths like threatened birds. Once released, they may never return. If they do, they have chosen home and the bird-worms are calmed into an ars poetica.” —Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds
September 21-November 2, 2013
how long will you have to make clay pitchers
that have to be broken to enter you?
--Rumi
It's easy to categorize things in our lives or in the world as either falling apart or coming together, but these things are always happening in tandem. By paring them down to simplest form and bringing them into the same room, the juxtaposition illuminates their relation to one another, how they are two sides of the same coin. Construction and destruction are both part of the same unfolding story.
In destroying and mending objects there is an opportunity for reflection about the meanings and stories we attach to these objects. By transmuting the objects, there's the possibility of transmuting their stories as well.
It is an opportunity to glimpse into the possibility of a new organization of meaning. It is the way things are always breaking down and building up at the same time. It is the making and remaking of meaning. It is systems and stories that no longer work in their wholeness, things that have to be pieced together from what remains, from what has been worn and torn and shattered, loved into loose strands.
May 5-May 30, 2010
Preview Reception: Wednesday, May 5, 5-9pm
First Thursday Opening: May 6, 6-9pm
In Search of a New Metaphor is an exploration of the embodied metaphor and of the multiplicity of meaning in object, moment, or experience. The creation of this body of work has been for the artist "a celebration of working with my hands using the textural materiality of craft media as a thread between themes of relationship, communication, language, connection and interconnection, and the struggle to make meaning." You will find variety of media including printmaking, painting, installation, and hand-stitching.
I am a practitioner of the can-I-have-its, a collector of things. I am the sort who walks through antique shops touching everything, wondering what place these objects could hold in my life. I flip through the ikea catalog and salivate, just a little. I am, indeed, firmly ensconced in the material culture. As a result, I have a lot of stuff, a LOT of stuff. And as an artist, it's worse, because there is always some potential use somewhere down the road for that quirky rusty, something-or-other. In the last months I have been exploring the place of the gift in our culture, and the relationship between faith and fear and abundance and scarcity. I believe that the structure of artificial scarcity is not only self-perpetuating, but in fact, self-catalyzing. What happens when we believe that there is enough? What happens when we act on that belief? So in the spirit of the gift, I am embarking upon a mission to give away the things that I do not need. It is a practice of faith, and an act of rebellion against dominant capitalist culture. Is it a little crazy? Probably. Is it going to be hard? Absolutely. But here I go.
From new moon to new moon I take a daily walk. Something finds me along the way. I photograph it; it comes home with me. This is an exploration of daily practice, of ritual, of context, and of the act of noticing, paying attention. Join me.
In February, 2011, saddened by the USDA allowance of GM alfalfa, I staged a private protest in my kitchen.