Although Jeremy Shantz calls his upcoming exhibition “A Documentation of My Private Suffering,” he says it would be better to call it “A Documentation of a Private Suffering,” if only because what he is trying achieve draws from a phenomenon that is not specific to him, but is innate to us all.
The problem is people don’t tend to view art that way, he says.
An obsessive collector and sculptor, Shantz has been creating art for as long as he can remember. He received his bachelor of fine arts with honours at UBC Okanagan and the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where he studied classical painting, sculpture and film.
His show includes 12 large-scale paintings, a personal project for the Salmon Arm native who made the decision to create the series a year ago.
In his artist statement Shantz says, “In a sense, a work of art has just as many points of entry as there are viewers to find them.”
He’s playing with the idea that people don’t know how to view art and that the meaning of a piece of art is restricted.
“People won’t think of their own suffering. As long as they think it’s me suffering they will have more to pull from, like what makes a traumatic event and what makes this kid need to paint this,” said Shantz.
In reality the paintings come from a mixture of experiences. As a professional artist now living in Montreal, he does a lot of commercial work, where the ideas are assigned and personal inspiration doesn’t usually find its place.
But once a year he takes the time to pursue a personal endeavour and that means the work is a blend of banked emotions.
“Whether we like it or not we’re working through problems all the time,” he said.
Shantz has spent the last month creating this series, targeted for Salmon Arm.
It’s a lesson in how to view art for a demographic that he believes doesn’t know how to read art.
“They’re literally just going to be sitting there going, ‘what do I do with this?’” he said. “I hope they can come into it and be like ‘I never knew what art was because this is so weird.’”
“That’s the beauty for me, putting something out there and seeing if it worked, hearing people talk about it and seeing if those few signifiers (symbols) that I could esthetically paint could make somebody think about something.”
Shantz struggles with the idea that the art has to be titled, saying every title is misleading, especially since he describes this series as an open dialogue – “it’s depicting but it’s vague.”
By keeping it vague, but insinuating his own suffering he hopes it will encourage people to find their own conclusions of what the paintings could mean.
“You can view art however you want but no one knows that,” he said.
The word “traumatic” has been thrown around in the description of the exhibition and his artist statement, but Shantz is apprehensive about the term because of its negative connotations.
He really sees the paintings as representative of any event that has an impact on your life, not just a negative one.
“I think it’s describing what everybody deals with,” he said. “You have stuff your dealing with now, the stuff you have to deal with down the line and maybe something that happened last year…”
This will be the first time Shantz has displayed his work in his hometown and he is still uncertain of the outcome.
However, he welcomes the opportunity to introduce some contemporary work to the community.
He says he would like to see more of the “low-brow” young demographic displaying art in Salmon Arm.
“I hope it’s viewed the way art is meant to be viewed,” he said. “You come in and take what you want from it rather than it being like ‘this is what the show is about, please try to understand.’ I just don’t want it to be that.”
