Looking at Stephen j Shanabrook’s work is like watching the horse jumping over an obstacle and instead of landing on the other side it starts to float and you are lost. Like a man on a wire, Shanabrook restlessly walks the disturbing line between heaviness and zero gravity, between painful and sweet, death and beauty; melting them together – metaphorically and literally – into one frozen state, one fossil. In ‘Hopping Hills, the Pharmaceutical Landscape’, the artist melts plastic prescription pill bottles and presses them into the form of Easter bunnies. An installation of running and hopping rabbits made out of hundreds of empty pill vessels suggests that prescription drugs have become the new religion, with addiction to drugs the new American side effect – the result of lost hopes and multiplying disconnections between people and reality.

In Shanabrook’s sculpture ‘Island of the Lotus-Eaters’ the viewer is seduced by the beauty of a huge flower, which upon closer examination becomes again, just a pile of melted drug bottles. On his long journey back home Odysseus visited the lethargic island of Lotus-Eaters. The lotus fruits and flowers, which were narcotic and addictive, were the primary food of the islanders. The Lotus-Eaters entertained Odysseus’ men to the drug causing them to forget about their strong desire to go home, now they only wished to stay and eat more lotuses. The labyrinthine journey back home is the methaphor of our lives. While drug induced illusions have the tendency to bring us ‘home’, most of the time it’s a wrong turn on a slippery road – and often a fatal one.

Shanabrook isn’t a stranger to addiction, he went to hell and back on his own. Whith a mix of materials in non-stop experimental process, which for the addictive personality is never enough, in combination with themes of longing for home – strongly reminds us of another mover – Martin Kippenberger. With similar types of gestures, such as one where Kippenberger painted his Ford Capri in brown paint imbued with oatmeal, Shanabrook covers common plastic soldiers in delicious dark chocolate in his new installation ‘Battle of Losers and Lovers’. The sweet, desirable chocolate dripping on the white surface of stacked office tables (an allegory of the everyday working process) becomes messy bloody evidence of fear and dissatisfaction with one’s self.

In his rather horrifying statement ‘The Chocolate Soldier or Heroism – The Lost Chord of Christianity’ C.T. Studd (1860-1931) said “a soldier without heroism is a chocolate soldier! ...dissolving in water and melting at the smell of fire. Sweeties they are! Bonbons, lollipops! Living their lives in a glass dish or in a cardboard box, each clad in his soft clothing, a little frilled white paper to preserve his dear little delicate constitution.” More than a hundred years later we understand that there should be place for all – chocolate soldiers, losers and lovers. While, and especially because, society puts so much pressure on people’s lives, that every day feels like a battlefield. And in the end of the day we want a prize, we want chocolate, we want home. Shanabrook remembers reading an account of a field medic from the Vietnam War. “He was explaining what he carried with him in his medic satchel, these bare necessities as he called them included: gauze, morphine, tape, comic books and M&Ms. The candies were for the mortally wounded soldiers, the ones that would never make it to the field hospitals. For these soldiers the candy was a way to satisfy a simple desire to feel closer to home, before they slipped away into that unknown jungle.” (Veronika Georgieva, 2009)