Shannon Oksanen Greensleeves

VTO welcomes Shannon Oksanen for her second solo-exhibition at VTO in autumn 2004. VTO will present ten new paintings created by Shannon Oksanen in the course of this year. The paintings in this exhibition take their imagery from Robert Bresson's 1968 film ‘Une Femme Douce’, the director's first film in colour. The works focus on the film's central female character, played by Dominique Sanda, a character who, like the young woman in Bresson's earlier film Mouchette, is 'suicided by society'. For some time Oksanen’s paintings have been using film stills as a subject matter (including stills from Mouchette). In 1999 at her first solo exhibition at VTO the artist exhibited grisaille paintings derived from stills of Roman Polanski's black and white film ‘Repulsion’. For this new body of work Shannon Oksanen was interested to move forward by employing grisaille in its traditional role as underpainting and as a support for colour.

Included in the exhibition is a new film work presented as a two screen video installation entitled ‘Greensleeves’. The film documents her own performance of this very old folk song on a very heavily amplified guitar (a Fender Jazzmaster through two 100 watt Marshall half stacks). The second film shows a trip by the artists daughter, Ivy, to a petting zoo in the Vancouver area. The references for this work are the cover of the Beach Boys album, Pet Sounds, Godard's One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil). Shannon Oksanen makes hereby references to the trackingshot in the studio while Mick Jagger lays down the vocal track for Sympathy, and of course Jimi Hendrix' performance of the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock.

Shannon Oksanen lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.

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Shannon Oksanen "Greensleeves"