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Spencer C Shoults is NOT an artist whose paintings draw the eye of the collector of quaint landscapes or sunny abstracts.  His art is neither quiet nor still.  Nor is it exactly loud and full of motion.  Instead, it is steady, persistent in its impressions, and full of layers that show his process.  He works dilligently and constantly with many different medium, elements, and ideas.  What is contiguous is his sense of humor and story - the viewer is party to an open ended dialogue with each piece.  Shoults plays with our sense of things, makes us uncomfortable without us exactly knowing why -- at least at first. 


Shoults was awarded the 2009 Emerging Artist award at this past Spring's Magic City Arts Connection, which gave him a prime spot at the main entrance to Linn Park during the annual festival.  I got there just as a homeless man wandered up to survey the paintings on display.  The man asked Shoults, "What is that?" pointing his crooked finger at a brown, blobby stain in the middle of a strange stretch of canvas.  Spencer smiled politely, his freckled nose slightly crinkled, "A painting - well, what do you mean?  What's what?"  The man pointed more directly at the brown stain, then to a red smear, and turned to look at Spencer with wildly insistant eyes. "Oh!" Spencer laughed, "It's paint.  What'd you think it was?" "Oh!" Spencer laughed, "It's paint.  What'd you think it was?"  The homeless man shook his head and looked at me.  Not paint.  "It looks like the walls of a mental hospital.  You ever gone to one?"

But Spencer was talking to a new group of guests, now, who were forming a small line behind the tent to get their prize - a jewelry box that held inside it a tiny hot pink iced & swimming pool blue sprinkled cupcake.  Drawn on the bottom of the box was a number.  Each number corresponded with a liquid - my number was for liquid fabric softener.  Others drew numbers that corresponded with vodka, lotion, cider vinegar, and the list went on.  And of course, there were instructions.  This was all a private experience that Spencer was giving his friends of a larger-scale installation that had run at Space One Eleven from November 7 to December 12 of 2008, Lifecycle of Cupcakes in 7 Parts (otherwise lovingly known by its nickname, Cupcakes!)

In 2007, Shoults had built another installation in a show he did  at Space One Eleven with his father, Randy Shoults, that consisted of honey, muslin, a system of valves, and a vessel where the honey dripped.  The mystery element in this installation was time.  How long would it take the honey to go from point A to point B.  There were limited variables -- such as how the honey was dripping through muslin, which distributed it either into the funnel which led to the vessel or dripped the honey elsewhere -- but it still was somehow exhilerating to contemplate the honey, to watch as it slowly dripped into the vat below or fell somewhere outside of it.  For me, personally, art always gets deeply personalized, metaphorized, and applied to something relevant in my life.  It can be taken as slightly narcissistic, but it's rare that I take anything at face value...

But to talk about the cupcakes installation - that's the real humdinger, here.  Cupcakes! went up like a series of paintings, brilliantly colored cupcakes neatly set in shadowbox type frames, mounted on the wall.  Above each was a container of fluid with a tube running into each box of cupcakes.  Every container of fluid was a unique substance - a- 3 % solution of Hydrogen Peroxide, b- White Wine, c- Distilled Water, d- Honey, e- Motor Oil, f- 40 % solution of Grain Alchohol, g- 5 % solution of Acetic Acid.   Some of the cupcakes responded immediately to the liquid they were being subjected to, and others seemed unchanged, even at the end of the installation some weeks later.

The final phase of the installation, those weeks later, was to release the fluid that had collected from each of the boxes of cupcakes into a trough below.  Oh the smells, sounds and sights!  At this point, some of the cupcakes were unrecognizeable.  Some looked like they'd been through a blender (but smelled more like they'd been regurgitated).  And as mentioned before, some seemed unchanged, just maybe a little soggy. ...it still was somehow exhilerating to contemplate the honey, to watch as it slowly dripped into the vat below or ended up somewhere outside of it...

Watching the transfiguration of the cupcakes, whether you went by several times periodically during the installation or waited to see the end result as a surprise, of course, spoke to something larger -- at least it did for me.  Contemplating the grain alcohol soaked cupcakes, for example, I was impressed by the idea that everything we put into our bodies has an immediate and a cumulative effect.  Or how, when exposed to the hydrogen peroxide, the cupcakes became unrecognizeable mush, in the boil and turmoil of enormous stress, I tend to feel like unrecognizeable mush.

Again, I realize I am taking great liberties and asserting my own personal experience of the installation, but what's the point of art if we don't walk away a little changed by the experience?

Paul Wilm documented Shoults' installation at Space One Eleven on video, which you can watch through the link below.  There is also a link below to a photo gallery associated with the exhibit.

Over the course of Issue 2 - we will be highlighting Shoults' work, beginning with the cupcakes, and focusing on how this artist presents the process of creation and destruction as art itself.  While the end product may not be aesthetically pleasing, the ephimeral result and visceral response it elicits is quite delicious!

Shoults has never been to a mental hospital, and though he won't answer such questions as, "Is that what it's supposed to be?" his amusement at the question tells me that he at least enjoys seeing where the viewer's mind wants to go.

Video: 

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