In recent art, the modernist notion of the fragment as a microcosm has given way has given way to a willingness to let fragments be fragments, to allow partiality to exist. As in the case of Bruce Nauman’s awkwardly dysfunctional formalism, wholeness is something that can only be played with, and the image of wholeness only a paltry comment on the lost utopianism of modernism. It is a bit comparable to a kind of acting out of socially expected norms, the

presentation of a false “true self,” long after the notion of a unified psychological mind has given way to the standardization of the schizophrenic model. In Shaw’s work, both the whole and the fragment spring onto the scene as if in conspiracy with one another. After she cuts up and arranges the layers of marble paint within her composition, the traces of an overt collage aesthetic are consummately glossed over to the point where the image can be mistakenly

perceived as a whole rather than a composite of cut-ups. 

Catalogue essay, Jacquelyn O’Callaghan Jacquelyn O’Callaghan is an art critic, editor, and designer based out of Atlanta, GA and New York, NY.