"If you've visited the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum's current Decennial exhibition, you might recognize a work on the floor of the Armory Show: a sculpture by John Shen that is on loan to Boston-based gallery Praise Shadows for the run of the fair. To make After Image (2024), Shen left the piece's 14-inch CRT television on for four years straight, displaying an image of the artist's mother taken about a year or two before she gave birth to him. Because of this, the photograph has been permanently inscribed onto the monitor's screen. Connecting the experiment with Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and Carl Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious, Shen was moved to display the image during the pandemic when he went years without being able to visit his mother, who lives in New Zealand. Playing on the monitor is a 48-minute video in which Shen subjects himself to a Thematic Apperception Test, a psychological evaluation that 'uses a series of ambiguous images to delve into an individual's personality, emotions, and subconscious conflicts'; his wife, who is off camera, conducts the exam.
Also on view are striking direct positive photographs by Shen that were taken with a camera he constructed over the course of a year made up of some 28,000 black cocktail straws. At the preview on Thursday, he walked me over to one and asked me what I saw. I said it appeared to be two figures performing some kind of modernist dance. 'Perfect-I love that,' he said in response. In fact, the unique print is a photograph of a floral arrangement from his 'Bouquet' series. The effect is stunning, with the straws creating an analog pixelation that abstracts this familiar image until it is unrecognizable, a gesture that is in line with the artist's fascination with psychoanalysis." - Maximilíano Durón
