Paul Shortt: Signs for the Future
December 2023 to March 2024 @ Pennant Place
928 NW 21st Ave, Gainesville, Florida
Curated by Flounder Lee
Artist Statement
In Signs for the Future, artist Paul Shortt presents 5 banners that imagine what issues, rules and technology signs will address in the future. Some works play with the possibilities of the future with works such as Time Travel Meeting Point and Violators Will Be Teleported at Personal Expense, imagining how signs could change through science fiction level technologies. While other works are more critical of current and future technologies such as AI Not in Use Here, and Facial Recognition Banned. Signs that suggest a push back to our current obsessions with AI and algorithms. The works are also hopeful for the future, with the sign Climate Restoration in Progress imagining a future where we are slowly restoring the damage caused by climate change. Taken as a whole the works attempt to cautiously and playfully imagine a future with possibilities.
Curatorial Statement
Paul Shortt’s work is playful and thoughtful. It is bright, eye-catching, and ponderous. His series range from advice for navigating the art world or the adulting world to ideas of surveillance, borders, and consent. We are trained to pay attention to street signs for warnings and he plays with this idea to get our attention. In his prints and books, he subverts this idea with patterns and overlapping colors that both draw and deflect your attention. Here, he imagines the implications of technology both emerging and far fetched to think how our world, and our signs, might change.
Artist Biography
Paul Shortt received his MFA in New Media Art from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his BFA in Painting from the Kansas City Art Institute. He has participated in over 80 group and solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally. His videos have been shown at the Museum of the Moving Image, The Phillips Collection and Whitespace Gallery. He has been in numerous group exhibitions in Washington, Philadelphia, Miami, and Baltimore. He has participated in residencies at The Luminary, in St. Louis and Wave Pool in Cincinnati. He has participated in over 40 Art Book and Zine fairs including Printed Matter Art Book Fair’s in New York City and Los Angeles in addition to art book fairs in Vienna, Austria, Toronto, Canada, and Baltimore. His artist books are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, and Yale University. Shortt has spoken about his work at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, China, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio. He has been written about in Hyperallergic, the Washington Post, Bmore Art and Review Magazine.
Shortt is currently based in Gainesville.
https://paulshortt.com
Instagram: paul_e_shortt
Individual Flags are for sale for $400
11×14 inch prints are available for $25 or a set of 5 for $100
Contact Paul for sales
Upcoming Exhibitions
TBD