108 Beacon Street
Somerville, MA 02143
Artattack108@yahoo.com
Phone: 617-441-3833
Fax: 617-800-2678
state of beautiful destruction. The painting is titled Battlescenes III (Fallujah) and the
artist responsible for this vision of violence and decay on display at the Art Attack Gallery
is as out of the ordinary as the works themselves: She's an American Army veteran who
goes only by the name of Shanti, and she's a schizophrenic.
The world Shanti paints is neither familiar nor kind. It's not subtle either, but it is riveting.
Battlescenes III (Fallujah) resembles Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, but lacks
its cold rationality (Duchamp aimed to depict, or catalogue, the passage of time). The
wastelands depicted by Shanti bring to mind the Surrealist landscapes of Ernst or Dalí,
minus the uber-sexual content. There is a complexity and depth of feeling that lies under
the structural surface, which has the slick, disturbing quality of good anime. Beauty and
violence neatly and terribly coexist.
“People voted in Bush again, so essentially they voted for war,” Shanti said in a recent e-
mail interview. “It's something they must have wanted-it appealed to them on some level.
They desired destruction. I thought it would be interesting to document the war by
creating these scenes of destruction, but to also make them aesthetically pleasing so
that they may be desired by people as well.”
To understand her day-to-day experience, Shanti suggests, “Imagine tripping on drugs,
it's kind of like that, and sometimes you have a bad trip and sometimes a good one. Both
trips you experience are not reality-but then they are, aren't they? It's all really occurring
but it's occurring in your mind, and nobody else is aware of it.”
So if you can envision watching the battle in Fallujah while tripping your balls off, that
might somewhat approach the feeling of Shanti's paintings: vivid, visceral and totally
fucking terrifying.
Shanti began showing signs of schizophrenia when she was six years old, and really
doesn't know what it is like to be “normal.” It's a disease that most people don't show
signs of until they hit their twenties. She enlisted in the Army a few days after being
expelled from school for missing too many days, which, she says, “had a lot to do with my
disease and the isolation aspect of it.” Her symptoms were not bad enough to impede
her entry to the military (schizophrenia is degenerative and she was only 17). She was
never sent to combat in Iraq; instead she worked as a secretary in Fort Jackson, S.C.,
and absorbed all of her nightmare images of the battle of Fallujah through television
broadcasts.
In the past three years Shanti's condition has worsened. “Everything I see, smell, taste,
hear seems to be shattered into a million pieces, and instead of seeing the whole
picture, my mind is bombarded with these pieces,” she says. Language is difficult and
“questions seem to have a million correct answers and I won't know which one is the one
that the person asking wants to hear, so I'll be speechless ... Even simple yes or no
questions can become very complex in my mind.”
Given her cognitive difficulties, painting seemed a natural choice. “Painting is a way that I
can express how I perceive life to others ... My style of painting is a reflection of my mind.
People often cannot guess what the subject matter is in my work. But to me it's so very
obvious. They only see the fragmentation, but I finally get to see the picture as a whole.”
And her painting is attracting a broader audience. Even those who aren't usually into
abstract art have responded to the paintings, notes Art Attack director/curator Heather
Somershein. Ultimately, however, these paintings, although they appear to be so, are not
abstract. They depict a reality, through madness, of madness. The sad thing about it all
is that most of the supposedly sane can't seem to put this together. Unlike Shanti, we
have the ability to accept or reject information as we see fit. And as long as no one faces
the true reality of the horrors of war, no one will have to take responsibility for what's
been done.
Shanti's work is on display at Art Attack (108 Beacon St., Somerville.
617.441.3833) through May 11
Somerville Open Studios weekend (April 30 & May 1, noon-6pm).
The opening reception will be April 1, 6pm-9pm.
www.theartistshanti.com
www.artattack108.com
