Subduction
She constructs a convincing deeply playful logic based on formal understanding of pattern and geometry. Beyond the formal, her instincts propel her art to that rare zone of originality where unique abstract language is clearly defined.
Dennis Pinette, Maine-based painter
Venation
Shannon Rankin is an artist who uses the language of maps to explore the complexities and interconnections between the inner and outer worlds, between that which is known and that which remains beyond the field of knowledge, that mythical place on medieval maps where the dragons lie and cherubs blow the wind. The duality of our human capacity for imagination and reason, for creation and destruction, for being of nature and apart from it, is a rhumb line that courses through her work.
Suzette McAvoy, Executive Director and Chief Curator at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art
FAULTED
Shannon Rankin has always invented her own terrain. She maps landscapes of imagination, juxtapositions of time and place, experience and information transformed and reorganized into elegant and precise and surprising patterns. They are maps of her heart and her mind; they are surprising allegories of human navigation.
Deborah Weisgall has written about the arts for many national publications, including The Atlantic, Fortune, Esquire, and the New Yorker; she has written often for the New York Times. She is also the author of two novels: Still Point and The World Before Her, and a memoir, A Joyful Noise: Claiming the Songs of my Fathers.
Void
Shannon Rankin works with maps and their vernacular to orient us anew to the world and its most enduring quality: change. In series like Earth Embroideries, she transcribes melting ice sheets in Antarctica via satellite imaging into minimal depictions with thread on paper, literally confronting our attempt to hold on to (and hold in our hands) what we can, even as the environment around us shifts, both challenging and sentimentalizing the act of map-making.
Maggie Grimason is a writer and editor living in Albuquerque, NM.
Unearthed
Shannon Rankin uses maps to express the constancy of change. Maps are fundamentally about charting and defining, fixing with exactitude some sense of place. Yet there are metaphorical maps as well: maps of the mind (where memory and experience are the sextants and compasses of a personal cartography), career maps (which navigate the path of our livelihoods), emotional maps (which bind us to expectations about relationships that don’t allow for growth and development), and so on. Yet boundaries keep shifting – glaciers melt, one country annexes another, we have revelations that shatter our identities, we get downsized, we grow apart and divorce. Rankin obscures and changes the neat grids, longitudes and latitudes of her maps using ink, salt and wax. By doing so, she captures the ephemeral reality and usefulness of any map.
Jorge S. Arango is a writer and editor based in New England.
Get in touch.
Shannon Rankin is a visual artist whose map-inspired works explore transformation through the lens of geography and natural systems. She has exhibited internationally, completed residencies at institutions such as MASS MoCA and the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, and her work is held in both private and public collections including Fidelity Investments, Maine Medical Center, and the Portland Museum of Art.
Based in the Southwest, Rankin brings over two decades of experience to commissioned work—collaborating with clients across sectors, from corporate to cultural, to create custom pieces that resonate with personal or brand narratives. To inquire about commissions or collaborations, please fill out the contact form.
