Stephen Shugart: Fragile States
Multimedia artist Stephen Shugart navigates complex emotional states amid our current era of AI, political instability, and economic and environmental uncertainty in his new exhibition, Fragile States.
The exhibition features abstract sculpture and painting that continue Shugart's ongoing investigation of the tensions between nature, society, and technology, and between organic and geometric form. Working with found and industrial materials, colored light, and projected and AI-generated video, Shugart builds forms that feel both improvised and precarious.
Tissue paper stretched over wire armatures forms fragile, skin-like membranes across the abstract sculptures, while weathered wooden forms balance precariously on stone and steel. Together, the works underscore both Shugart's own sense of fragility and a broader, universal one — the feeling of instability that defines the present moment.
"Elegy for the Last Ballerina (The Last Ballerina Not Yet Replaced)” Aspen root, satin pointe shoes, bailing wire, polymer acrylic on tissue paper, Soji paper, screw-in projector mount, mini projector, AI video created with Deevid.ai, 32” x 32” x 18", by Stephen Shugart
Mark Brasuell: Pank
Artist Mark Brasuell presents PANK, a new exhibition of paintings opening October 2 at EDGE Gallery in Lakewood.
The title PANK comes from Brasuell’s playful Southern reworking of the word “pink,” but it also carries another idea: reaching the pinnacle of something—pushing an idea, a color, or a painting as far as it can go. PANK becomes its own word and its own attitude. It also plays off the old expression “in the pink,” meaning to be in excellent condition, at your best, or thriving. That feels particularly fitting for a body of work that Brasuell sees as hitting a new high point in his painting.
The paintings are bright, colorful, layered, and unapologetically physical. Some contain suggestions of the figure, but the figure is never really the point. Instead, the work is about texture, buildup, repetition, and things and things and things—marks, colors, shapes, lines, and surfaces accumulating until they become something unexpected.
Some paintings are surprisingly subtle, allowing small bursts of intense color to emerge from quieter passages. Others simply slap you in the face. Still others operate almost as color studies, exploring how one color can support, fight with, bury, or completely transform another.
Brasuell has been developing this body of work and its ideas for many years.
“I really feel like I’m hitting a groove with this show. I’ve been working with these ideas for a long time, but something has clicked. I’m interested in how much can happen on a surface—how things can build up, disappear, come back, get covered and then suddenly explode with color. Some of these paintings whisper. Some of them yell.”
EDGE Gallery
6501 W. Colfax Ave, Lakewood, CO 80214
Gallery Hours:
Friday: 6–9 PM
Saturday & Sunday: 12–5 PM
Private viewings are available by appointment.
Visit www.edgeart.org for more information.
Event Links
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/3844260-0
