antennae (black) Sculpture

BIO Shamona Stokes (b. 1980) is a Jersey City, NJ-based artist. She holds a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY (2002). Her sculptures and mixed media paintings explore the imaginary figures and landscapes of the subconscious. In 2017, Shamona exhibited her work for the first time as one of the regional semi-finalists in the Bombay Sapphire Artisan Series (Allouche Gallery, NYC). She’s exhibited at The Untitled Space (NYC), at art fairs like SCOPE (Art Basel Miami) and Superfine! (NYC), and has also worked on large-scale installations–most recently a shrine dedicated to the human imagination–shown at the Fort Worth Community Art Center in Texas. Her work has been featured in media outlets like New York Magazine’s “The Cut”, The Jealous Curator, ArtSlant, Create! Magazine, and Friend of the Artist. Shamona’s body of work is a product of a meditation practice which began in 2016. Prior to that, she hadn’t made any artwork in over 16 years. ___ STATEMENT My art practice focuses on reconnecting to the inner child’s joyful sense of play without attachment to final outcomes. From 2016-2019, I worked primarily with ceramics to build a “family” of imaginary friends inspired by my subconscious mind. I found that clay was an easy entry-point to begin making artwork after a 16-year hiatus. Its unpretentious qualities reminded me of making mud pies in the woods as a kid. Feeling strange, like an outsider, is a large theme in my work. This stems from being the child of immigrant parents from India, having a father with autism, and going further back, to having a paternal great-grandfather that was an extreme outsider: living as an American missionary in an Indian leper colony and later a cave in the Himalayas. I celebrate our “alien-ness” by making strange figures: plant creatures that are part flower-part human, sacred-looking space buddhas, and cartoonish fertility statues. In 2020, I’m starting to explore 2D mixed media by painting the dreamworlds that my creatures might inhabit. The initial allure of ceramics was the spontaneous and magical ways in which the glazes mixed. I’m re-creating this unpredictable process in 2D by allowing inks, watercolor, and salt to mix organically on paper to reveal landscapes and forms. I’m being led by the materials and am working purely from my imagination.