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Always Begin At The End uses common iconography to address loss, memory, empathy and failure between the private and public, personal and political spheres. The exhibition centers around a marble tiled arena covering a significant portion of Smack Mellon’s 4,000 square foot main gallery floor. A felled chandelier, a record player, seashells, chairs, chain link fencing, cast body parts, doors, cardboard boxes, a reconfigured American flag, and loose change add to the range of quotidian objects that the artist has carefully scattered throughout this sprawling stage and across the gallery walls. Displayed together at Smack Mellon for the first time, this new body of work has been made within the past five years, encompassing two polarizing presidential elections and the most extreme lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This exhibition features many objects made from cast paper, alongside combined found objects that the artist alters, construction materials, and a single hand-drawn pencil animation metaphorically smashed by rocks. Much of Shpungin’s works can be seen as “drawings” in the sense that they are literally covered in drawing’s most ubiquitous medium: graphite pencil. This material marks, delineates, coats, and covers the surfaces and crevices of her objects, transforming them into solid shadows. Graphite itself is a dynamic medium that amasses darkness as well as reflectivity the more it is layered onto a surface. Shpungin painstakingly covers each object but does not obscure it, in a process that both masks and gives depth. She also uses drawing to sketch and to plan, outlining the possible future incarnations of a thing—an object, a building, an idea. Shpungin’s self-reflexive works are their own loops that construct, mark, and imagine through the process of their own creation.
Shpungin’s objects often begin as symbols from the artist’s personal history but are disguised within their own common representations. The works come together as an archive, a futile and heroic attempt to chronicle absolutely everything in the world. Her works are led by a heartstrong conceptualism based on personal and collective memories and formed through careful intersections of familiar objects and materials. In some cases the works are embodiments of literal metaphors, and, in others, their meanings are embedded in the actions that caused their creation, such as Paper Weight (Win), (2016), a graphite covered brick crushing a sheet of drawing paper. The exhibition’s title Always Begin At The End, and its acronym ABATE, signal to the way that time can loop, how stories can start in unexpected places, and how a journey’s end might be less than its imagined start. At the end, afterall, the material we will have had to work with is all already there.
BIO:
Diana Shpungin is a Brooklyn based, Latvian born American multi-disciplinary artist who has been exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions in both national and international venues including: The Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx, NY; Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, AZ; Bass Museum of Art, Miami, FL; Locust Projects, Miami, FL; Franconia Sculpture Park in Minneapolis, MN; Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic; Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Invisible Exports, New York, NY; Marc Straus Gallery, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT. Shpungin was awarded the 2019/20 Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and the 2017 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture. And has also been the recipient of awards, fellowships and residencies from The Foundation of Contemporary Art, The MacDowell Colony, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, CEC Artslink, Dieu Donne, Bronx Museum AIM Program, and Art Omi. Shpungin’s work has been reviewed in publications such as Artforum, Flash Art, New York Magazine, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, The New York Times, Timeout London, Connaissance des Arts, Le Monde, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY and is currently an Assistant Professor at Parsons: The New School for Design in New York City.
Image:
Diana Shpungin, installation view of Always Begin At The End, 2022. Site specific mixed-media installation of hand-applied graphite on objects, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of Smack Mellon. Photo: Etienne Frossard.
This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York City Council Member Stephen Levin, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Robert Lehman Foundation, Select Equity Group Foundation, many individuals and Smack Mellon’s Members.
Smack Mellon’s programs are also made possible with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and with generous support from The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of The New York Community Trust, Jerome Foundation, The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Inc., and Exploring The Arts. In-kind donations are provided by Materials for the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs/NYC Department of Sanitation/NYC Department of Education.
Smack Mellon would like to extend a special thanks to all of the individuals, foundations, and businesses who have contributed to the NYC COVID-19 Response & Impact Fund.
Space for Smack Mellon’s programs is generously provided by the Walentas family and Two Trees Management.
Additional support for the exhibition Diana Shpungin, Always Begin At The End was provided by The Pollock Krasner Foundation, The Foundation For Contemporary Art, and Dieu Donne.
