Home Is Where the Art Is: Ethan Shoshan

Ethan Shoshan is an artist, community activist, and nonprofit computer a/v technical consultant born in NYC. He has exhibited and performed on the streets and at the Kitchen, Aljira, Envoy Enterprises, Commonwealth & Council, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Judson Memorial Church, The Center for Book Arts, La Mama La Galleria, Dixon Place, Le Petit Versailles, and other venues. Previous projects have been reviewed in The New York Times, Art In America, LA Weekly, Huffington Post, BlackBook, The Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Washington Post, among numerous other publications.

NEW YORK, NY- Ethan Shoshan finds that his practice has “changed and been reinvented” by social distancing.

“I’ve been doing these daily sketches of places I’ve visited where there are signs and words to draw inspiration and musing for the day.  The sketches are pseudo architectural contour drawings with various perspectives… They are funny and timely.”

His new drawing series contrasts the out-and-about nature of many of Ethan’s pre-COVID-19 projects: be it through his performance art or his activism, social engagement has long been an important element of Ethan’s artistic practice.

He’s worked in a variety of creative capacities with Visual AIDS, Democracy NOW!, MIX NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival, Gay Men’s Health Crisis and Food Not Bombs.

In 2015, Ethan co-directed Arts in The Woods- “an annual retreat at the Easton Mountain Queer Retreat Center for over 50 queer/trans visual artists, performers, dancers, musicians, makeup, and culinary artists” which “uniquely encourages collaborations between different generations of queer artists.” From Ethan’s website:

“The program uniquely encourages collaborations between different generations of queer artists. Half of the artists are taking a break from transience or staying at homeless shelters in NYC and Boston. The other half are at different points in their journeys…

Arts in the Woods grew from a desire by more established queer artists to co-create with young transient artists passing through queer youth homeless shelters. The program dismantles the hierarchies established in dominant systems of culture, nurturing a cohort of young queers to take control of their own representation. All participants agree to respect and learn from each other, as they take time away from the transphobia, police brutality, money troubles, and other pervasive social ills that plague our cities.”

He also co-ran “WERRRQSHOP!,” a free drop-in art workshop at the Joan Mitchell Foundation, with Quito Ziegler. The program started as a way to facilitate and create art projects with the transient LGBTQ youth he volunteered for at Sylvia’s Place emergency shelter.

In addition to his service-oriented projects, Ethan has creatively engaged the community through his performance art. He “sees performance as a doorway to the unconscious” and has connected with “alternative venues communities that engage and experience his work in ways that have both changed the participants/community and himself beyond the experience of the live performance,” as his artist bio states.

His “Heart Bench” performance, which he describes as “an intimate restorative technique for self care done individually for 2 hours” feels particularly timely as we all try to maintain our well-being in the midst of a crisis. After an artist talk for the work’s Dreamhouse installation in 2016, Ethan wrote:

“I wanted to take the time to talk about self care amidst the turmoil, fear and anger we are constantly facing and offer some tools for our community… caring for each other and ourselves. I’ve had to learn to care for myself over the years and trust my own understandings of how to ask for help and how to learn how to help myself…

It’s the things we do that help us control the things we can’t.“ 

In “Aquatic Spell,” installed at the Gene Frankel Theater Benefit in 2017, he grapples with technology’s ability to both distort and bring clarity our surroundings- another important consideration as we grow increasingly dependent upon virtual connections while social distancing. As “the audience surrounds [a] stage in complete darkness watching what is moving in [a] 3d hologram,” Ethan reads from his journal:

“as an artist we work with whatever resources we have to transmute something into existence…

much like this theater i piece together technology to make it work is as simple a process as possible
its where the beauty in something so mundane or utilitarian can change your perception
and its with this that I’m hoping to cast a spell
by showing you things in nature that are slowly disappearing things we haven’t been able to preserve and what we will soon be destroying…

the more that technology gets us away from our humanity the more i feel i have to work with it to show us something we are missing.”

One overarching element of Ethan’s practice that persists as he creates from home is his playful and poignant interplay of words and visuals.

In 2017, he published Breadcrumbs, “A series of field notes during [his] travels that explore imagery, ideas, and personal experiences in short writing/ poetry form” that he developed over the course of a 10 year period. The book, which features both “short prose and images [that] shift between erotic, quotidian, and metaphysical realizations,” was released in tandem with Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair at MOMA PS1 at the Allied Productions Inc table.

His 2019 and 2020 works, “Not Goin Anywhere (So Deal With It)” and “i’m always thinking of you even when i’m kissing another boy” are further examples of the ways in which he has used text in his art.

Today, with performances and service-oriented activism temporarily on pause, Ethan is finding ways to remain engaged while staying at home:

“I’ve been cooking and baking with roommates, keeping a daily practice of exercising and stretching, keeping up with the news and friends... I’ve been making cotton masks for friends as well.”

To learn more about Etha Shoshan’s work, visit his artist website http://www.disiterate.com or follow him on Instagram @disiterate