LOS ANGELES, CA.- Fran鏾is Ghebaly is presenting Through the Tunnel, an exhibition of recent works on paper by Ann Leda Shapiro, complemented by selected earlier works from an oeuvre that spans six decades. Throughout her career, Shapiro has charted the interconnected nature of our world: the way humans are both nested within a larger ecological framework, yet contain intricate networks within themselves. In the works on view in Through the Tunnel, the macrocosm mirrors the microcosm, emphasizing the cyclical nature of birth, life, and death.
The title of Shapiro’s exhibition evokes anatomical nervous and vascular systems, which themselves echo root patterns of the natural world. The philosophical core of Shapiro’s work is that no one system can be isolated from all others. Through the Tunnel is anchored in Healing Scrolls, a large-scale, four-part painting that diagrams the body at a cosmic level. Drawing on Shapiro’s work as an acupuncturist and extensive study of Chinese medicine, the Healing Scrolls are a composite of patients and their patterns of disharmony, serving as a diagnostic visual case study that proposes a holistic understanding of body and landscape.
Through the Tunnel also implies a transformative experience, a phrase applicable to both birth and death. Drawing on her own near-death experience, during which she traveled through a tunnel in a state of utter peace, Shapiro employs the tunnel shape to structure many of the recent works on view. Cellular, 2026 depicts a body elongating and abstracting into its constituent parts, as it returns to the ellipsoid structure of a cell, the most basic element of life. Similarly, Birthing Upside Down (Thru), 2013, depicts the beginning of life as the mother and child emerge out of a single, shared body, through a narrow, striated space, their faces reflecting one another. The painting presents birth not as the procession of a lineage, but a shared experience of formation and recurrence.
Through the Tunnel presents these more recent works by Shapiro alongside a selection of works spanning a six-decade long career. The presentation of these early works by the artist serves to underscore the longevity of her commitments to spiritual practice, scientific research, and feminist activism. Tightrope, dating from the 1970s, depicts a female body engaged in a delicate balancing act–walking, it seems, on the edge of the world. Yet, she is equally entwined with cosmic, star-like forms, illustrating at once the vulnerability of existence, and the support offered by the expansive systems we are connected to.
Ann Leda Shapiro (b. 1946, New York City) lives and works on Vashon Island, Washington. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Axel Vervoordt, Antwerp, Belgium; the Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong; Fran鏾is Ghebaly, New York; and Fran鏾is Ghebaly, Los Angeles. She has shown extensively in university and community exhibition spaces, as well as in exhibitions at Banff Art Center, Banff, Canada; Frye Museum, Seattle; Manetti Shrem Museum, Davis, California; Seattle Art Museum; Autry Museum, Los Angeles; the Boulder Museum of Art; De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, Mass; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She is the recipient of a MAC Fellowship from the McMillen Foundation, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, a Twining Humber Award and the Betty Bowen Award, which includes a solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum. Her works are held in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Seattle Art Museum, AMOCA Museum, Wales and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Washington.
