Within (And Beyond) Parenthetical Frames: Shaan Ken Rao’s Solo Exhibition at All Street Gallery
By Calli Ferguson
All Street’s current Lower East Side exhibition, parenthesis, opens with an image of a man standing at the edge of a diving board. Fully clothed, his toes in sneakers and socks near the edges that hover over the water. With a lightness in his upper body, a cigarette lit in his right hand, the subject’s eyes gaze down at the pool.
It naturally sparks engagement within the not-knowing– a sort of discomfort between hesitation and momentum. And of course, there’s something of a visual cliffhanger (almost literally) in that image, highlighted somewhat serendipitously by the washed light burn scrubbing the bottom of the print– letting us know it was the last shot on the photographer’s roll of film.
“I think it's kind of symbolic of how things go,” Shaan Ken Rao said of print’s burn. It’s the multi-media artist’s second solo show with All Street Gallery– this time his work is on at the gallery’s Hester Street space through Aug 15, 2024.
“I like this starting image because he's kind of standing on the edge of this pool, and he's looking forward, I guess, to the next moment,” Rao shared with me during a walk-through of the show before its opening last Thursday.
The subject of that opening image is the artist’s friend, Ken, who he met at a treament facility in a shared journey of addiction recovery. Rao later described of his time there, “...you reflect, and then you kind of plan for when you get back to the real world.” It was just that sort of liminality that came through so poignantly in that work titled ken looks down at pool. That feeling and Ken himself remain present as the viewer moves through the exhibition’s narrative…
parenthesis install shots courtesy of All Street Gallery
With painterly compositions through a photographic lens and the mixing media of collage and painting itself, Rao is able to create spaces within the frames of his work that feel like something of a bubble. Where within, it is not the past or future itself, but reflection and/or anticipation of each respectively. At times those spaces feel meditative and peaceful, while at others uncomfortable, looming, or restrictive. These tangible tensions between restlessness and release are noticeable throughout the experience of parenthesis.
That journey takes a viewer through time and memory, confronting identity and transitions… “Once you get clean, there's the old version of you that some people will never look past,” Rao explained of the inspiration behind the captivating multi-media piece, desdemona, “... then there's the new version of you that some people do understand, see how you change, and it's just about how people respond to that.” Then, a similar sense of duality shows up in moments of juxtaposed stillness and movement, or captivity and serenity. As the viewer circles the room, Ken reappears in a powerful triptych of photographs where he waves goodbye and gets in a truck, wherein once again, the bottom of the last image is burnt off at the end. “It's a sad, I guess, indication of the future for Ken… and the end of his story with me,” Rao shared of the impactful work.
There are many ways, like this, where Rao generously lets the viewer in through this exhibition. We get to see into the artist’s world from a girls’ school that Rao’s father helped to make in Pakistan to a diptych, naoshima trees, displaying two photographs of his mother. In the beautifully full-circle closing piece, she stands on a bench overlooking a vast body of water. Only this time, in a second image, the subject sits down. And through a show where that restlessness and release were so at odds, we are left with a kind of surrender and an enchanting sense of peace in observing the vast and expansive landscape ahead.
parenthesis is on view at All Street Gallery’s LES location @ 119 Hester Street through Thursday, August 15th with a closing reception at 7 pm.
learn more at allstnyc.com