About
Shelby Shaw is an artist and writer based in New York. Her work has been commissioned by or appeared via Yale, Artforum, The Believer, The Photographers’ Gallery (UK), MIT List Visual Arts Center, Screen Slate, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Wendy’s Subway, Topical Cream, ORAL.pub, and more. Documentation of her live poetry writing at MoMA PS1 for the 2016 New York Art Book Fair will be included in Printed Matter’s NYABF Archive, and her zines have been exhibited at Yale’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media; she separately gave a talk at Yale on her research into psychic mediums and performance as technology, which has an accompanying essay forthcoming. She can be heard talking about her autobiographical writing as arts practice on episode two of Are.na’s show on Montez Press Radio (an excerpted transcript of which can be read here).
Shelby teaches critical writing to photo and video students at the School of Visual Arts, and has previously taught at Rhode Island School of Design. She is a Festival Editor with the Sundance Film Festival for the 2025 edition.
Shelby has worked with artists’ moving images and independent/art house cinema for over a decade during her career with the film programmers of the Currents section (formerly known as Projections) at the New York Film Festival, the programming and admin for IFC Center, and roles with the Cannes Film Festival, IFC Films/Sundance Selects, Tribeca Film, Music Box Films, the Motion Picture department of ICM Partners, and director Hal Hartley. You can see which films she loved watching for the first time in the annual year-end lists begun by Screen Slate in 2020, plus 2021, 2022, 2023 (underneath Dash Shaw’s list), and 2024.
She holds an MFA in Digital + Media from Rhode Island School of Design (2022) and a BFA focused in Film, Video, Writing & Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2013). In 2018 she was an invited Researcher to the 31st Images Festival in Toronto, Canada.
Shelby is not on social media.
About (Long Version)
Objecthood & Images < Death & Afterlife > Legacy & Memory
My writing and arts practices are protean in form, yet always rooted in research: my library is also my studio. Writing is my primary medium, namely by asking questions I may or cannot concretely answer, and my research has always revolved around taxonomies of presence and absence, as well as the relationships between legacy and objecthood. My written work has taken form as experimental books, personal essays, criticism, interviews, poetry, short stories, scripts, hypertext websites, fake spam emails, video essays, and graphic memoirs. Although my art and writing include various mediums, I prefer to work in analogue modes and am focusing currently on photography experiments, printed matter in prose and illustration, relational exchanges, and text-image objects. I am not on social media.
In 2022 I received my MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where I focused on the ontology of images, to challenge the existence of images. My work, through the Digital + Media program, sought to answer my pre-RISD thesis question of whether images archive, or whether they manifest, existence—particularly by dissecting the objecthood of images in the forms of printed and digital photographs. This question of images and objects was born in August 2018 with the unexpected passing of my father. Since then, my written and visual work have been more candid about legacy and memory, death and the afterlife, and the illusion of images as containers or objects. My thesis ultimately disproves the existence of images as objects through the lens of grief and memory, and can be read about here.
While doing my graduate work in a program heavily weighted by modern discourse on technology, I comfortably found myself refusing to embrace the current trend of constant digitizing and technologically upgrading. Rather, I now (more than ever) believe in embracing forms of joy and craft off-line as much as possible, and am always seeking ways of furthering this as a practice and a philosophy. Technology is helpful and necessary in many ways, but should not replace our abilities to develop human and artisanal skills for ourselves.
From 2015, I had been the curatorial Programming Assistant to the section championing experimental and artists’ moving image works during the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. Originally called Projections (2014-2019), the section was expanded and renamed Currents in 2020, and presents an international program of shorts and features premiering to New York audiences (and, often, the world). In my ninth year with the Festival, in 2023, I chose to resign from my role with NYFF in order to focus on my own creative practices, after my multi-pronged career in the film industry since 2011.
A more detailed chronology of my experience, both professionally and creatively, can be found under Credits & Events. Below is a detailed timeline of broader concepts.
About (Historical Timeline)
In 2016 I began research towards a grasping of nothing: what is it to be no-thing versus to not be no-thing? How is absence a quantifiable lacking of presence? Looking into relationships involving Self and Other, I found logic to be caught in a paradox of the dual natures of necessity and invention: one cannot be had without the other, but then how can either be defined as itself or isolated?
By 2018, my research had grafted onto information science and the subject of images. My questions of no-thingness were scaffolding to the concept of the moving image, a “concept” rather than a “thing” because I believe it is non-existent: a moving image is never a singular object. I pursued this subject following my time at the 31st Images Festival (Toronto, Canada) where I was an invited Researcher. Again, I met the problem of ontologically isolating (or dissecting) a concept as a whole from its constituent parts. In August 2018, my father unexpectedly passed away. This sharply pivoted my thinking and research towards the concept of legacy through memory, images, and objecthood, and survival of consciousness as demonstrated by psychic mediumship.
By 2019, I had evolved my philosophy of the machinery and logos of imagery into a multifaceted thesis founded on an existentialist objecthood of visuals. Now, my concerns about the image include its validity of data and the verification of the life or death of that which it has inherently manifested or recorded. Related are the performativity of archives and taxonomy of documentation, and the architectural genetics of digital and analogue images, which extends to include the interfaces by which images are seen by sentient beings as well as by computer vision. Examining the manifestation of energy into images is a supplementary aspect of my research for visually observing ontological phenomena through quantum physics, including questions of being or nothingness, presence or existence, and the real or the virtual. I began looking into parapsychology and working with psychic mediums.
In 2020, I left my career in New York City’s film industry and began using technology in a research-based practice in the Digital + Media graduate program at Rhode Island School of Design, to understand how, and as what, existence and its affects are manifested, generated, or maintained through images, interfaces, and data, as “seen” by computer vision or sentient beings. Questions served as my architectural designs for collaboratively constructing inquiries, theories, and intentions. The computer became one collaborator for me, just as I became the computer’s computer.
In 2021, I returned to magical practices as part of my research, particularly to reveal the categorical silos which contemporary society has passively inherited to separately regard magic, religion, technology, and science (which I would argue are not really all that different from each other). At this time I completed writing a thesis book challenging the objecthood of images, and questioning whether an image requires any objecthood in order to exist at all. This autopsy of grief, legacy, and objects is contained in the book The Image Is neither Here nor There.
In 2022, I shifted focus to work on a variety of printed matter projects, including a long-form graphic memoir that combines my thesis on the objecthood of images and the unexpected death of my father, a project that I began in 2019 and is currently ongoing. All other books created in 2022 can be seen by clicking here and include cross-genre non-fiction, speculative criticism, dystopian short fiction, and graphic memoirs primarily on the subjects of loss, memory, and objecthood. Strongly influenced by reading Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (1998) in February 2022, I found what felt like a long-lost home and kinship in the concept of an artwork being created by and located in the exchange and activation of encountering the artwork. As the thesis project to cap my time at RISD, I designed the interactive and participatory installation The Philosopher’s Stow, in which I used the art book fair table as a medium to present the books I had designed and printed from my years of research. I was sitting at the table to talk about the works with visitors, as well as signing and numbering books as I sold them, and finally writing live improvised poems as free take-aways. However, due to catching COVID-19, I was unable to actually carry out The Philosopher’s Stow as planned, and so the table was laid out without my presence. In the fall, I worked at Cabinet magazine’s office in Gowanus, Brooklyn with the editor-in-chief while he was in town.
In 2023, I chose to resign from my role in programming with the New York Film Festival, in what would be my 9th year. Continuing my focus on legacy and objecthood, I assisted with the production and exhibition catalogue of the second Found Object Show in New York City, and began working with more found objects in my own multimedia practice. In the same vein, I began working as a Cataloguer at a New York auction house, where I research and write about thousands of items, artworks, and designs ranging across antique, vintage, and contemporary eras. In April 2023, two of my zine booklets were exhibited at Yale as part of the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media’s Ultra Space Symposium: Arakawa + Gins. In November, I returned to Yale to give a presentation on my research on performance and psychic mediums for the Machine as Medium Symposium: Matter and Spirit. My paper will be in the accompanying publication due out in later 2024. In December, the web art site ORAL.pub published my semi-autobiographical hypertext of 100+ pages, Fictional Fidelity (2020).
2024 history forthcoming
Education
MFA — Rhode Island School of Design (2022)
Digital + Media
Conferred with Certificate in Collegiate Teaching in Art + Design
BFA — School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2013)
Film, Video, Writing, and Performance
