Stephen J Shanabrook

Chocolate casting. Highly gross.

Excerpt from here


"Stephen J Shanabrook is a New York and Moscow-based artist who uses food both as medium and metaphor. Using commonplace materials and forms generally seen as benign indulgences— sweets, chocolate, and cotton candy — he brings about disturbing new meanings, exploring the intersections of desire, violence, permanence, and death. (See his"Waterboarding" sculptures — chocolate-waterboarded choir boy Christmas statues — that we covered last week.)
In the 1990s, Shanabrook, who spent his youth working at a chocolate factory, went to morgues in Russia and the US and made molds from the fatal wounds of anonymous people, cast dark chocolate pieces, placing them into luxury chocolate boxes. The series of works, which Shanabrook described as "very close to the edge, the forbidden place for artists," are essentially representations of death or what one critic called "bonbons of mortality.""






Mark Weaver


Collage/montage, 60's style illustration 







Formalism, tension, transparency, form





Recreated a lunar landing as performance/video art within a gallery. All handmade props and devices contrived from common materials. 



Other Objects:
Branding, name, type, icons






Cast bronze. Painted. Hyper-realism.





Genetic engineering, relationship between man/animal/science
Empathetic Anthropomorphism 
Latex, silicone, hair (?)








Identity in self portraits
Manipulated Polaroid 
All shot in his own kitchen







Hollywood phrases
Found metal, cut, welded and ground





Modern myth monsters
Cultural identity
Wood cut on jigsaw, patterns painted and built, laminated wood for volume











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