Cut AND Paste 2020
Stephen Sheffield
www.stephensheffield.com
617-875-3009
My series titled Cut AND Paste, is part of an ongoing large body of work begun in January, 2017. The work selected here was made since January 2020. I chose this edit from my most recent work because I wanted to focus on its sense of immediacy, and its relevance to the current news cycle and my intuitive reaction to it.
Before dawn in the solitude of my studio I work while listening news radio, drawing from the topics from each specific day and reacting directly in real time. Every piece is begun and finished, dated and signed on that one day, often before I see my children off to school and during this season specifically before beginning homeschooling due to quarantine.
I draw my material from a purposefully specific years of LIFE Magazine and limit myself to a 14x11” format. The years just before my own birth, the late 1940s up to 1965, represent to me what has been perceived to be an ideal time. In this work I explore the “ideal” façade presented in the advertisements vs the unease I read in the articles. I attempt to subvert that ideal and use the past unease, while at the same time drawing a parallel to the unease in the spring of 2020. Within this process I cannot help but instill my own humor and anxiety of modern manhood and parenthood with image juxtaposition and the inexact process of cutting with a scalpel, and fixing the paper with glue.
