SHAUN KARDINAL
THIS IS HOW WE LEARN
J. Rinehart Gallery announces our second solo exhibition from artist Shaun Kardinal. His exhibition, This is How We Learn, continues the artist’s work in embroidery and weaving to simultaneously destroy and fortify paper ephemera. Extending temporal dimension with intentional exposure to sunlight, Kardinal confronts the dissonance of layered perception, and invites viewers to make meaning in contradictions.
Shaun Kardinal is a conceptual artist driven by socio-ecological anxieties and insights gleaned from physics and meditation. His cross-disciplinary art practices manifest as altered ephemera, modular structures, and interactive installations.
Currently based in Philadelphia, Kardinal is a conceptual artist, curator, and collaborator. His cross-disciplinary art practice manifests as altered objects, modular structures, collaborative exhibition platforms and interactive physical-digital installations. He is the recipient of two 4Culture Grants and a 2019 GAP grant recipient from Artist Trust. He continues to push the boundaries of found objects and materials with his interventions.
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This work explores visualizations of a noisy, modern mind—mine, really, it’s the one I know best, but I’m hoping you will relate—woven into beatific and devastating photos of the world we share. These images were found in books, postcards, and street-side free piles of Baltimore and Philadelphia, the cities I’ve called home for the past few years, and repurposed as canvases for embroidered patterns and the building blocks of the piece itself. Some were installed in windows for several months beforehand, allowing colors to fade and shift. This intentional, temporal degradation helps to capture a sense of the pregnant, present moment.
As you consider the intricate interplay of each piece, paradoxes may emerge—clarity is found within interference, colors exist only as we perceive them, and truths lie nestled within contradictions.
There exists a deeply humanistic urge to view what’s to come in this world as an end. But I encourage you to find another vantage. There is hope in our failures, for they provide us with invaluable lessons, shaping our growth and understanding.
This is how we learn.
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Shaun Kardinal is a conceptual artist driven by socio-ecological anxieties and insights gleaned from physics and meditation. His cross-disciplinary art practices manifest as altered ephemera, modular structures, and interactive installations.
This latest series continues his work in embroidery and weaving to simultaneously destroy and fortify paper ephemera, extending their temporal dimension with intentional exposure to sunlight. Through these processes, the artist invites viewers to confront the dissonance of layered perception, and to make meaning in contradictions.
Special thanks to Sharon Arnold for her consultation and ongoing consideration, but especially for encouragement to explore more organically.
