Shelter Serra

Homemade Hermes Birkin Bag, Sliver, Edition of 15, by Shelter Serra

2015

Shelter Serra is a multidisciplinary artist whose artworks probe the resonance of imagery and objects he has pulled from the wake of American visual and material culture to reexamine. Serra’s compelling sculptures of ubiquitous or iconic commercial products remade in bronze, resin, copper, or gold, are conspicuous replicas of recognizable forms. Serra’s paintings similarly announce their existence as reproductions of reproductions: halftone dots, hand copied typeface, mimicked printing glitches, the tones of a black and white photograph, or the vibrant colors of a thermograph, signal that the subject has been rendered, filtered through an image-making process employed for a particular end. By reproducing and recontextualizing these images and objects, Serra examines the cultural paradigms which led to their creation and commodification. The utility, absurdity, or desirability of the source image or object is contended with and re-assessed via Serra’s handmade proxies. His recreations provoke a conceptual consideration of the assigned, symbolic status of the original – fashionable, wasteful, threatening, luxurious, lowbrow – they test the limits or longevity of the original’s aura. If Serra’s choice of subject matter is perceived as a commentary on the ‘stuff’ this country generates, it is the viewer who has imposed this subtext. In the form of re-presentations of already manufactured products or reproductions, Serra’s artworks have a symbolic function. They point back to an original, and to the culture that gave that original meaning.