Solo exhibition: Fetish at Marcia Wood Gallery, January 26 - March 3, 2012. installation images

In her first Atlanta exhibition, Shawne Major presents assemblage works that are a scandalous carnival of visual and tactile pleasure. After earning her MFA in sculpture at Rutgers and living in New York in the 90's, Major returned to Louisiana where she grew up, and began making magical compositions of found objects that are about connections to ritual, fetish, and the handmade object.

Acclaimed for their physical and emotional impact, and their eloquence in describing the struggle with chaos, Major's works are a result of her re-enchantment of the materials from disposable production, and about answering the volumes of discarded consumerist objects with a personal levee against the flow.

Shawne Major, born in New Iberia in 1968, resides in Opelousas. She received her BFA from the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette and her MFA from Rutgers University, then lived in New York in the '90s. After beginning her career as a painter, Major turned to the found object assemblage "tapestries" she has been producing for over 15 years. Upon her return to Louisiana, she was selected along with 85 international artists to exhibit her post-pop, found-object assemblage works in the Prospect.1 New Orleans Biennial held in 2008. She has received grant awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Her work is in the Francis Greenberger Collection, New York, the collections of the Frederick Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, and the Paul and Lulu Hilliard Museum of Art, Lafayette. Her first Atlanta solo exhibition, "Fetish", will be held at Marcia Wood Gallery in January, 2012. Upcoming solo exhibitions will be held at the Chicago Cultural Center (April 2012) and the Hilliard Museum of Art in Lafayette, LA (September 2012). She is represented by the Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, the Heriard-Cimino Gallery in New Orleans and the Texas Gallery in Houston.