Shawn Bitters: Sublime Banter

If the Earth spoke to us, what would it say? Kansas City-based artist Shawn Bitters offers a series of encoded answers in Sublime Banter, a solo exhibition of new prints at Sargent’s Daughters. Subverting ideals of Manifest Destiny that accompany depictions of the American West, Bitters instead presents playful and subversive queer solicitations that emerge from active and animate landscapes.

Bitters begins each densely layered screenprint in the exhibition with an appropriated nineteenth century American landscape painting, printed via inkjet onto heavy archival paper. Onto this surface, the artist adds layers of glossy screenprinting which depict an imagined erupting volcano in his own graphic visual language. From this volcano, lava rocks (technically termed “lava bombs”) are thrown, scattered about the landscape in various saturated colors. Each work is a diptych; accompanying the landscape is a key in which each rock is identified with a letter. In this way, the landscape can be decoded and hidden messages discovered by the viewer.

For Bitters, a childhood spent in the mountains of Utah gave him a lifelong fascination with the power and beauty of the natural world. However, in the traditional American mythos, our relationship to the landscape is often framed as one of domination over the land and natural forces, echoing real histories of violent settlement and conquest. Bitters literally cracks open this imagery and its inherent ideology. Lava flows, and Nature regains an active voice in the work, forcing viewers to spend time unravelling its messages in a kind of deep listening.

Encoded messages have a long history in queer culture, from Polari, slang used by the gay community in 19th and 20th century Great Britain to communicate without detection, to the Hanky Code, which employed colored handkerchiefs in the back pocket as a visual public cruising code between gay men. In Bitters’ work, the Earth speaks in a similar type of code to convey similar sentiments. All text in the works is pulled directly from gay dating apps – succinct statements of desire sent to strangers online. This sly eroticism belies popular conceptions of Nature as either all-powerful or endangered. In Sublime Banter, the Earth not only speaks back, but it is also very clear about what it wants.

Originally from Orem, Utah, Shawn Bitters received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005. He is an associate professor in the University of Kansas Visual Art Department. Solo exhibitions include Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY; Swarm Gallery, Oakland, CA; Open Spaces KC, Kansas City, MO; Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, MO; and The Hall of Awa Handmade Japanese Paper and Museum, Japan. He has also exhibited at Planthouse Gallery, The International Print Center of New York, and Dieu Donné Papermill in New York, NY; Icebox Gallery in Philadelphia, PA; the Michener Museum of Art in Doylestown, PA; the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, NJ; The Kemper at the Crossroads and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO; and the Visual Art Center at the University of Texas, Austin. He has participated in artist residencies at Officina Stamperia Del Notaio in Tusa, Italy; Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, FL; Frans Masereel Centrum in Kasterlee, Belgium; The Hall of Awa Handmade Japanese Paper and Museum in Tokushima, Japan; and the Danish Council of Artists Residency on Hirsholm Island, Denmark. His work is held in the collections of the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA; Zuckerman Museum of Art at Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA; Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, MO; and Bill Arning Gay Art Collection, Houston, TX.