Dancing to meaning is what interests me, tracking space and time with marks and paint. My works are like selfies revealing bits of me against the world. As an intuitive conceptual artist, I track polymorphic knowledge against the seams of collaged actions that can burst at any moment. Wrangling with a monster is the most engaging process to conceptualize.

1. In a four-term analogy, the word “face” alludes to a corresponding feature of a rock—something already in existence to which the figure can be compared. Baby’s on fire, and all the laughing boys are bitching. Waiting for paintings, ooohhh oh ohh the plot is so bewitching. ♪ 2. The word “face” cannot perform the act of metaphorical resemblance, because no original term exists as a stand-in for it. The catachrestic effect of a rock’s “face” turns the perspective metaphor into an identity. (“Let me at ’em, let me at ’em!!” Crash! Bang!! Craashhhh! Whooosh “Ahhhhh!”)

My paintings focus on the power of the body and its sexuality, a subject that dominates both the personal and the social spheres. I use imagery from my own seductive/repulsive fears and fantasies, and work with vivid colors and gestural marks. However, my fascination is not with the beauty of the flesh but with the emotion it arouses.

I am a human recorder of my personal history, using animated images, emotional abstraction, cubist composition, and natural signs. I mix the exterior appearance of my daily life—whose order and hierarchy have lost their meaning—with the internal nature, or essence, that resides within it. The internal nature, or essence, here refers to “the inscape” that is redefined through the combination of the mundane reality and the psychic realm of the mind. Through the patterns and symbolic signs of American comics and Japanese anime, I depict the experience of my

My work is an imprint of an ongoing dialogue between myself and the medium, nurtured by the surrounding environment. Inspired by the convergence of scientific research, philosophy, religion, and everyday experiences, I seek the underlying patterns that shape our collective meaning-making and understanding of place.

I make associations freely, and at times, recklessly. Pulling clumsy metaphors from horror films, science fiction, and sports, I apply them to a loose personal mythology and symbolic language. I often begin a painting by first making a dimensional paper model. The symbolically coded scenes take place in shallow staged spaces. While creating these spaces, I am thinking about a reconstruction or collapsing of personal narrative, history, and myth.

My recent body of work is an exploration of a partially imagined pseudo-narrative netherworld haunted by some unidentified collective trauma. A series of lush scenes bathed in personal secrets. The drawings are constructed with a limited, chemical palette and the strange viscosity of oil-wax pastels on paper. Each piece plays out the intention that my viewers become voyeurs of a decorative necropolis where they are simultaneously indulged and denied, invited and disinvited, ignored and addressed. I am interested in identity and self-presentation as they relate to power

Shawn Michael Warren’s work brings attention and awareness to events and individuals (past and present) that have affected and shaped cultures and civilizations throughout the world.