Stass Shpanin was born in Baku, Azerbaijan (USSR), and received his BFA from the Hartford Art School and an MFA at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Fascinated by, but unfamiliar with, the social and cultural traditions of American history, Shpanin selects imagery used in the Northeast's regional arts as resources to contextualize the intersections of immigration, mythology, nature, and the evolution of Americana. Now a Philadelphia resident and Assistant Teaching Professor of Art at Rutgers University–Camden, Shpanin continues to examine the culturally and politically charged visual remains of American history.
As citizens of the United States are facing a reevaluation of the nation’s history, Shpanin reinterprets visual narratives based on historical, religious, and mythological symbols found within early American folk art and furniture. He presents an opportunity for visitors to challenge their current understanding of historical events and to ask new questions. What if we based our history on interpretations of the images within these objects and documents? What if we accept the artistic portrayal of angels, birds, flowers, and mythical creatures as reality?
This exhibition is the simulation of this alternative history and the result of visual conversations between the artist and image-generating Artificial Intelligence programs. Shpanin uses AI to digitally fragment graphic elements selected from the pictorial and textual manuscripts of American folk art of the 18th and 19th centuries. A selection of the imagery comes directly from the permanent collection of the Phillips Museum. Random but calculated repetition and combination of these graphic elements taken from birth certificates, marriage, and death records create a mutated reality full of contradictions and absurdities.
Co-curated by Lindsay Marino, Director and Collections Manager and Janie M. Kreines, Curator of Exhibitions & Engagement at the Phillips Museum of Art at F&M.
Headflower focuses on the parallel between human culture and natural ecosystems. By using the imagined intersection of human faces featured on oversized flowers, Shpanin questions the accuracy of images seen in many traditional fraktur works. How might this imagery influence the narrative of our collective history? Artificial Intelligence is used to replicate and alter the images, creating a mutated field of faces.
The geese featured in BlueBirds are created using local fraktur images found in multiple collections including the Phillips Museum of Art, the Winterthur Museum, and the Bucks County Historical Society. At the time Shpanin created this work, he was teaching a course on color and was exploring the juxtapositions of colored and monochromatic imagery. Here he also uses his technique of repetitive features, selecting the bird’s eyes, and incorporating them throughout the background. Shpanin used iridescent paint to achieve the feeling that the eyes are following the viewer.
This tilt-top table not only emphasizes the unrealistic scale of many of the images that were drawn on a variety of historical documents, but also Shpanin’s focus on the positive and negative space created by the color white. Influenced by David Batchelor’s book, Chromophobia, he has created 3D elements that lead to the questions, What do we not see? What’s behind the white spaces? It creates an immersive experience with invisible boundaries that allow for individual perceptions.
Shpanin’s work continues to examine American history as he expresses in this work, The Burning Pine. He has combined multiple components of 18th–century historical imagery including symbols from political images. The snake wrapped around the tree trunk reflects the 1754 “Join, or Die” cartoon published by Benjamin Franklin as a call for the colonies to unite during the French and Indian War. Shpanin also touches on religious symbolism including the story of Moses and the burning bush from the book of Exodus.
This patriotic image is an homage to birds represented in American political symbolism and Native American mythology. The bird’s eye and the stars blend together in the sky combining a carnavalesque image of idealism through the manipulation of natural elements to create a cultural and political narrative.
This work went through numerous alterations to visually dissect the imagery using AI image generating programs. Shpanin highlights many techniques including the use of digital deconstruction, white space as both a positive and negative, and the repetition and mutation of certain features. His use of colored borders complement the colors throughout the painting.
Shpanin has brought together a variety of fraktur imagery in this work. While manipulating the images, he realized that the composition abstractly resembled The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli, thus his title, The Birth. The negative white space between the figures provides a rest for the eyes while the remainder of the work is saturated with color and whimsical designs. Shpanin’s playfulness can be seen throughout with a female figure standing on a cat, the male figure’s eyes peeking out from behind the bush in the lower right corner, and the wave pattern that carries across the image, originating from the hem of the female’s dress.
Focusing on images of angels that appear on fraktur documents, Shpanin uses elements of the figure to create this landscape incorporating the hair, eyes, and wings. The river is the repeated lines of the angel’s hair with ripples that symbolize the horn’s sound waves. The iridescent eyes could be imagined as fish eggs in the water as the crossed-legged figure is depicted in the same position as some historical fraktur documents.
The figure in this work is Shpanin’s creative compilation of his fictional historical narrative exhibited in the adjacent Nissley Gallery. Shpanin plays with the idea that if Mrs. Ann Lawler Ross married George Washington it may have changed the whole course of history in the United States of America. Here, Shpanin imagined what their child may have looked like. This portrait hangs on the shape of a door that connects the past to the present, this gallery, and his intervention in the Nissley Gallery.