Shawna Duval's Projects

BFA Alumni

Major: Metalsmithing & Jewelry

Graduation Year: 2018

Artist Statement:

Through the construction of an interactive dreamscape, I intend to break the contemporary function of objects as a replacement for social interaction, using them instead to comment on a desire for contact and a lost playfulness. These familiar things, minimal and artificial, live as instruments of play as opposed to toys, more in communication with art-objects, electronics, or medical tools. Monochromatic metals, plastics, and rubbers displace the warmth of wood and flesh. By playing through materiality with the history of objects as symbols, they break from any original referents to perform an in-between, within reach of both the real and constructed reality. All at once, this space is playful, intimate, fluid, scientific and cold. There’s a rigidity to the Truth we’ve built with words, and a belief that children are somehow inferior for their lack of concrete categorization. This not only inhibits play, but a fluidity of the real. I want to implicate the body in order to access a more honest, unmediated, childlike awareness.

Biography:

Shawna Duval’s work imagines a reality that is at once playful, fluid, scientific and cold. Objects, installation, and interaction are employed to question our reliance on immaterial categorizations and to acknowledge our contemporary relationship with objects as replacement for social intimacy. She will receive BFA in metalsmithing from Maine College of Art in 2018. This past year, Duval was a finalist in the Niche Awards and recently her work has been exhibited in the Attleboro Arts Museum in Attleboro, Massachusetts, and the Southern University of Illinois, Carbondale.

http://www.shawnaduval.com

IG: duvalshawna