ShannonDybvigStudio

I try to make sense of human issues by looking at our world through a surreal lens and building worlds different from the one in which we live.

Surrealism gives me the opportunity to alter elements of the world around us to explore the relationships of human structures. Human-human relationships have so many chances to become complicated and collapse under their own weight. When the relationships become larger than one-to-one, the structures can become restrictive or oppressive in a very targeted way. It is also interesting to me to explore human-technology relationships. All of these bring up questions of what it is to be human, when do we stop being human or have our humanity stripped away. How do we restore humanity that is wrongly taken away, and how can we develop new structures which prevent wrongful dehumanization?

Building new worlds allows me to explore the issues of our own world through a degree of alienation, or to discover new problems that arise when current issues have been resolved (or never existed to begin with). I also enjoy the challenges that come with developing unique cultures and settings which are still accessible to human understanding. New characters and creatures give me an outlet for expressing my emotions quickly and succinctly, and having those characters exist within a larger created world gives context to those personified emotions.

My favorite media to work with are pencils, ink, alcohol-based markers, and more recently digital painting and photography. My traditional and digital art tend to heavily feature expressive linework, while my photography is characterized by limited color palettes and a strong awareness of light.