Artist Bio
Morgan Thomas Shankweiler splits her time between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the coast of Maine. She graduated with degrees in sociology and studio art from Williams College and studied miniature painting in Jaipur, India. Her background in sociology informs her work, which examines community, relationships, and the commonalities of human experience through aleatoric drawings, paintings, and data visualization. Shankweiler has been awarded residencies at the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation in Maine, SVA in New York City, Penland School of Craft in North Carolina, and Da Vinci Art Alliance in Philadelphia. She works as a portrait painter for MuralArts Philadelphia. Her award-winning work has been exhibited in solo and group gallery shows and collected across the continental U.S. and online. Upcoming adventures include teaching a two-week workshop at Penland School of Craft and residencies at ChaNorth in New York and Peninsula School of Art in Wisconsin.
Artist Statement
Fascinated with the overlap between the rules of games and the systems of social life, artist Morgan Thomas Shankweiler considers the ramifications of the social world we live in and models recognizable moments in social time through the visual recording of aleatoric game-play. Predominantly working in paint on paper and panel, Shankweiler focuses a trained sociologist’s gaze on the interplay between individuals, systems, and chance. At once representational and abstract, the broad reaches of her practice are connected by her use of an asemic language of linkable units; grid squares, blocks, rope segments and knots, chain links, paper clips, to metaphorically represent the ways in which we connect in society. She describes her smaller works as “microscope slides of interaction; an information-rich sliver of a larger social organism that is too complex to perceive in full.” Larger works are ‘net’works, each channel, knot, or link corresponding with a connection that holds a community of people together. Her work straddles a line between realistically-rendered metaphor and abstract data-visualization as she maps those elements that shape a life—the chance, agency, systems, and stories—as a method of untangling the intricate chaos of the gordian world in which we live.
In Interplay, Shankweiler presents pieces from three series of work: By-Chance Connection, Tie Formation, and her newest exploration of indeterminacy. These most recent works overlap her painting practice with a craft practice through the building of painted games for interactive play. She uses indeterminacy to offer up a “finished” product that can be manipulated in perpetuity by viewers. As in her painting process, the game parameters are a stand-in for social systems or jurisdictions, but in these games, the viewer’s haptic engagement records agency and individual sovereignty within and beyond the imposed order of the artwork. The “finished” work harnesses the potential to be interpreted through the preferences of the viewer and invites the viewer to experience the artist’s process. By taking the themes in her work and making them playfully interactive and accessible, Shankweiler reinforces our understanding of art as a universal language and furthers the understanding of play as remedy to contemporary societal ills. Interactive and socially engaged work posits the artist not as messenger, historian, or truth-teller, but as mediator, posing questions for the viewer to answer. As a connection occurs between individual and game, interplay also occurs between participants, one’s choices influencing another’s, empowering participants, and strengthening community in analog.
Checklist
Alphabet of Connection, 2022
Acrylic on indigo-dyed wasli paper
21" x 15"
A Quaint Dissolution, 2022
Acrylic and colored pencil on Indian wasli paper
21” x 15.5”
Bluest Through The Break In the Briar, 2022
Acrylic and colored pencil on Indian wasli paper
21” x 15.5”
Dominos; Infinite Exquisite, 2023
Acrylic, plaster, flocking, and wood plus 24 domino tiles
15” x 23.5” x 2,” each tile approx. 1.5”x4”
Exit Strategies, 2022
Acrylic on Indian wasli paper
Approx. 21” x 15”
Loose Threads at the Fringes, 2023
Acrylic, ink, and embellishment on Indian wasli p;aper
Approx. 21.5” x 15.5”
Seen and Unseen, 2022
Acrylic, colored pencil and graphite on Indian wasli paper
21” x 15”
Sketch 1, 2022
Ink, acrylic, and colored pencil on found paper
11" x 8.5”
Sketch 2, 2022
Ink, acrylic, and colored pencil on found paper
11" x 8.5”
Sketch 3, 2022
Ink, acrylic, and colored pencil on found paper
11" x 8.5”
Sketch 4, 2022
Ink, acrylic, and colored pencil on found paper
11" x 8.5”
Tempo, Bridge, Coda, 2021
Puzzled block prints, acrylic, and gouache on indigo-dyed wasli paper
21” x 15”
Tie Formation 2; Code Switch 5, 2022
Acrylic, plaster and colored pencil on paper mounted on panel
50” x 38”
Tie Formation 3; Philadelphia Homophily, 2021
Relief print and acrylic on paper
50” x 38”
Wolf Moon and an Answerless Question, 2022
Acrylic, gouache, and spray-paint on indigo-dyed wasli paper
21” x 15”