Breanna Shanahan

Breanna Shanahan (she/her/they) is a recent resident of the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas (Hamilton) Shanahan is an artist, researcher and educator whose sculpture and drawing practice focuses on a community engaging process of collective creation which she calls Daily Art Practice. Shanahan received her MFA at Concordia University in 2019 and was a SSHRC recipient in 2017. She is a director at the Hamilton Artist Inc. and one of the newest members of the Assembly Gallery artist collective. Shanahan is a member of QO (Quite Ourselves) artist collective and her works have been exhibited in Italy, China, Austria, the United States of America and in Canada. Shanahan has taught Sculpture and Drawing courses across Canada at multiple post-secondary institutions. 

My two-dimensional and sculptural works intertwine in my practice as I engage with the hand-made and machine-made as players in the work's outcome. Many projects push the capacities of a machine’s intended function, allowing for a body of work that is constantly adapting to new technologies and methods of trace. I seek to investigate, research and create works that engage in cutting edge outputs, rooting works in the ‘object’. These works play with and push installation to allow for new experiences within the white cube. 

In my practice I keep up a Daily Art Practice that seeks meaning in work after and during creation. This approach of research creation poses the question: What is it to produce everyday or on smaller scales? What do we create for? How can constraints of time and materiality, along with engagement with others steer ideas and forms? I seek to take part in conversations outside my singular experience and recognize how the roles we play with others create unique versions of ourselves. Working off of basic understandings in the field of social psychology, projects reimagine ‘relation’ in visible forms, being as receptive and impacted by those they are created around and with as we are in impacted in human societies.