Long Evenings To Get Obscure
Oil on canvas
153 x 153 cm
2026

No Old Wounds Where Hope Actually Turns
Oil on canvas
153 x 153 cm
2026

Open Palms Expose Nerves Under Pressure
Oil on canvas
125 x 125 cm
2025

We Are Not Done Ever Reaching Far and Roam
Oil on canvas
153 x 153 cm
2025

Nothing Outside Governs Our Daily Steps
Oil on canvas
153 x 153 cm
2026

Handing Over Lingering Doubt Over Nothing
Oil on canvas
70 x 85 cm
2025

Shannen Muhl

I employ art as an opportunity to use the medium of subjectivity to express truths hidden in plain sight. The relationship between the witness and the work provides a door through which one may pass, allowing them to encounter and interpret the story created for them. Yet, once the witness arrives at a moment of contemplative completion, they may find themselves standing before another door waiting to be opened. They may remain where they are if they wish, or continue onward toward the deeper true meaning within the work.

In my newest series, Secret Words in Red, I reveal a story of the events that have led me to the present moment. Hidden within the forms, titles, texts, and spoken poems of the exhibition is a coded autobiographical narrative that invites the witness to search as deeply as they desire. Through these layered fragments of experience, I hope the witness may uncover hidden meanings within the work and perhaps even within themselves.

This heart is sore.

I spoke my years, through recalling unburied truths hidden, and now done.

This heart isn’t silent.

I’m still more yellowed.

Scars tell only reckless yesterdays I lived in.

Various ended days, pressure accumulated in nerves.

Art never dissolves.

Want expresses anxiety privately today.

After nothing done, walking into something held to observe.

Endings stayed closed and pulled east to obscurity, and not explained why.

Lingering in frantic expectation.

This, held in silence, I stayed marked young, through ruined unsaid things held.

When asked if I might consider “toning it down” when referring to my art, I often wonder how such a thing could even be possible in the world we currently inhabit. To “tone it down” is to become quieter, more polite. It’s to willingly soften one’s response to systems, violences, hypocrisies, and fractures that continuously shape the conditions of contemporary life. Silence is too often mistaken for peace, when in reality it can become a form of complacency, and complacency is precisely what has allowed so much of the world to decay into spectacle, division, exhaustion, and disconnection.
I have no interest in making work that politely waits for permission to exist. I am tired of lying still beneath the weight of it all, hoping things will somehow resolve themselves while the world burns hotter around us. My art is not just decoration. It is confrontation, mourning, resistance, confession, and survival all at once. It is a scream through clenched teeth. A flare fired into the dark. A hand grabbing another through static and saying, “Look at this. Feel this.”
I am an artist, damn it, and I refuse to whisper. My work exists loudly because the times demand loudness. It exists unapologetically because there are truths buried beneath the surface of contemporary life that cannot be uncovered through politeness alone. If my work unsettles, overwhelms, or refuses comfort, then perhaps it is only reflecting the reality from which it was born.