Strange Birds by Ethan Shoshan  A featured artist project with

Arthur Aviles, Jill L. Conner, Barry Frier, Bibbe Hansen, Geoffrey Hendricks, Jim Hubbard, Stephen Kent Jusick, Stephen Lack, Agosto Machado, Stefani Mar, Liz McGarrity, Lucia Maria Minervini, Angelo Monaco, Augustmoon Ochiishi, Uzi Parnes, Dennis Redmond, Hunter Reynolds, Charles Rice-Gonzalez, Rob Roth, Edward Rubin, Rafael Sánchez, Arleen Schloss, Gervaise Soeurouge, Sur Rodney Sur, Chris Tanner, Brad Taylor, Gail Thacker, Jack Waters, Kathleen White, Brian “Soigne” Wilson, and Stephen Winter

The Center For Book Arts is excited to present Ethan Shoshan’s featured artist project, Strange Birds.  This project encompasses vignettes into people’s lives through objects that hold significant personal meaning to them.  Through each object on display, a conversation with its caretaker begins; visitors have the freedom to peruse the objects and listen to an accompanying audio guide conversation.  It is through these stories that we connect and engage with the person behind the story and gain insight and an intimate connection to something deeper within ourselves.  From Bibbe’s relationship with her mom through gathering stones to a realization of home in acceptance of every moment as “perfect,” to SKJ’s first projector providing the construction of personal and social resources that help shape his creative community.  A new inspired look at timeless portraiture, weaving together personal archives and institutional archives, forgotten histories, memories, and embodied experiences in a testament and an affirmation of life and its lessons. 

Shoshan is a social ecologist, who also engages in aesthetic philosophical visual inquiries, highlighting the importance of everyday gestures.  For the last 2 years, Shoshan has been working with personal archives, relationships of the collection to community consciousness, personal identity and cultural understanding to help develop and preserve experiences within queer identity.  He has collaborated with Carlo Quispe and other artists; exhibited and performed on the streets and at the Kitchen, Aljira, PØST, Envoy Enterprises, Commonwealth & Council, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Le Petit Versailles, and other venues. His previous projects have been reviewed in The New York Times, Art In America, LA Weekly, Huffington Post, BlackBook, Art Quips, The Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, and Washington Post, and have aired on Public Access TV.  Shoshan’s projects bring back art, life, and experiences to something that is inherent in our human condition – the need to share and connect to the deeply personal, and in that a process of learning, exploring, archiving alternative histories that are experiential and heartfelt.