Shaw’s paintings, photographs, sculptures, film, collages, posters, comic strips, and installations often reference one another, engaged in a large narrative that unfolds over an extended period of time.
American culture
The investigation of American culture and history is emblematic of Shaw’s work. In the artist’s first major project, titled My Mirage (1986–91), a series of 170 images follows the story of Billy, a white middle-class male who navigates life in America of the 1960s and 1970s. Sex and drugs are among the few things Billy encounters, as is rock n’ roll, before he falls to cult membership and rises again with the aid of organised religion—a saga that Shaw drew from both his own and his friends’ upbringing.
In the painting King Cotton (2015), Shaw’s insights are more historical and socio-political. It describes a never-ending act, in which a green mechanical elf spins gold from the cotton giant, alluding to the repetition of history and questioning the morality of pursuit for power and wealth.
Oism
In 2002, the Swiss Institute in New York presented The Goodman Image File and Study, which purported to show the works of the O-ist painter, Adam O. Goodman. Oism, according to the exhibition, was an American religion whose origins in the 1840s coincided with the spread of Mormonism. Both O-ism and Goodman were, on the contrary, Shaw’s creations, conceived as a satire of religious fanaticism. Since its inception in the late 1990s, Oism has interrogated the rituals and practices necessary to maintain a religion through paintings, sculptural works, and films.
Drawings
Shaw’s work is diverse in media as well as in style. ‘Dream Drawings’ (1992–1999) series, one of his iconic works, features pencil on paper drawings that feature surreal and yet naturalistic scenes in the style of comic stripes. In a 2015 interview with Ocula, Shaw explained that the uncanny drawings began with his own dreams and their ‘occult way of telling ... in a satirical way or a symbolic way with things that are formally similar but not exactly the same’.
Also operating in the comic book style is the ‘Blake/Boring’ series, ongoing since 2011, which combines the surreal, fantasy world of the 18th century poet and artist William Blake and the superhero comic style of Wayne Boring from the 1950s.
