Douz and Mille is pleased to present the upcoming solo exhibition by Bill Shannon, WORK. This exhibition features the drawings, sculpture, video installation and multi-media art of renowned performance artist and dancer Bill Shannon. World famous for his lyrical balancing on crutches and skateboards, Bill Shannon’s explorations of balance within the multimedia installations presented in WORK offers his inventive originality in a new context and medium.

The exhibition WORK is anchored by Shannon’s spatial execution of multi-screen video installations. The video-as-sculpture serves to illuminate the stories of his many characters and the dances of his urban arts and disability history. In addition WORK features Shannon’s practice of recycling military, industrial and consumer waste into usable utilitarian objects with political implications. These playful reinterpretations and modifications of found objects were originally used in his early performance art as installation pieces and props. With this exhibition, Shannon explores the reframing of performance artifact as cultural critique and the use of metaphor and iconography to comment on that which is otherwise unspeakable. Bill Shannon’s art is an intricate layered sociological, philosophical, and political conversation with the viewer that simultaneously provokes and inspires.

Bill Shannon lives in Pittsburgh, PA. His multimedia art has been exhibited in contemporary art museums, galleries, and art fairs in the U.S. and Europe. Shannon’s video installations have been presented at Kiasma, Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art in Finland (2005), at the Tate in Liverpool, UK (2003), and the Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco (2005).

Bill Shannon has been honored with numerous awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2003), a Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship, a Colbert Award for Excellence: The Downtown Arts Projects Emerging Arts Award and a Pennsylvania Council of the Arts Interdisciplinary Arts Fellowship. He has received support for his work from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, James E. Robison Foundation, Bossak-Heilbron Charitable Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, and Arts International: The Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals. He has also been honored by Dance Magazine as one of its “25 to Watch.”

Bill Shannon holds a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Rody Douzoglou established Douz and Mille to promote independent curatorial efforts and exhibition projects focused on presenting contemporary art in context.

An illustrated catalogue of the exhibition with an essay by Laura Roulet will be available at the gallery show.