#20: 12/05/2025

Foolish Men and Searching Women - On the Work of Shelley Turley
By Benjamin Terrell

Gene Simmons on a Fall Day
mixed media on paper

Gene Simmons lost in the forest says out loud to no one, 
​ "Maybe only I exist and everything around me is a manifestation of all the things I think,
 or perhaps the opposite, what appears as me is a mere culmination or reflection of everything I have encountered."
"It seems even my thoughts mimic themselves once they are recalled."
 "But when did anything wild not wither to mild once brought indoors?"
 "Somewhere a dark star is always dimming because everything conceived in the woods is perpetually consumed in the parlor."
 "But the world will go on and on without me, without regard to my observations,
 decades will grind against future decades like the way sand polishes other sand
until every granule shimmers similar when touched by the sun."

Move'n Along
mixed media on paper

On his boot tips were the faces of dragons and although he wore impressive chest plates and shoulder pads of massive mechanical wads of tin foil, his make-up  was smeared from the summer humidity and he felt naked. He lumbered aimlessly alone like a golf cart with two left wheels.
​
At the same time, in a field only a mile away as the crow flies a woman in a blue dress reclines against a gold car and watches a barefoot man strum a guitar. Although he sits in the foreground, she is the center subject, and the field is filled with her song. 

Midnight Confession
mixed media on paper

"Oh, jester king of patriarchy,  you have made the world your microphone 
and history has been one long catastrophic karaoke night. 
You, who like Narcissus cherish the flame that consumes you. 
You who refuse to remove your shoes in the footnotes
and you never could stop touring
even after you soiled your own songbook
and you never would return to your seat or even ever acknowledge- 
Life is like an escalator; one always feels tallest at the top when embarking, only to inevitably end abruptly, 
smaller and not much farther along.
The future will one day loosen your grip with missiles of drudgery!"

Song Maker
mixed media on paper

"And he erases all the words and figures, names and dates, sentences and snares...on the blackboard of misfortune he draws the face of happiness."
  - The Dunce, Jacques Prevert 

I have read that the Sistine chapel was originally as bright and bold as a Sunday cartoon, that Gothic cathedrals were kaleidoscopic like seventy cereal boxes seen at once, that even Greek statues were as polychromatic as a summer popsicle and that the color conveyed additional information lost to us like a language forgotten. I have also heard that the only color in Plato's cave came from something beyond knowledge. But soot, silt and the stubborn nature of the male ego can combine to make a coarse Brillo capable of scrubbing away simple complexity. And when history is hosed down like a September pollen pocked screen door the color puddles brown-black, pink and mustard, green muddies like the color of artificial flower stems melting with faded uniform blue. Imagine if Genieve Figgis painted not majesty melting, but instead took a deep dive into The Little River Band. Imagine if Walter Sickert wasn't Jack the Ripper but instead Bea Arthur.​

Could You be Magic
mixed media on paper

Hundreds of thousands of videos and photos are shared online every minute and they are replayed hundreds of billions of times each day. The amount of digital decoding necessary to 
digest the average daily hours of online watching is enough to snuff out the possibility, potentiality and presence required to sit with mystery.  Where then are you more likely to meet the undiscovered you, in an algorithm or an art gallery? Which better redeems our mortal fallibility and sums up the awkward dance that is human longing- Tik Tok or Shelley Turley?

One armed monkey gets fed                    
Woman holds a naked man band in the palm of her hand

Traffic accident redemption                   
Confronted by a skull while we watch lamp lit ladies with flowers and drinks

Supermarket hijinks                 
The devil looms behind a nude mustached man lying in a candle lit pentagram

Random preplanned charity
Hands female and male reach out for each other over a wagon wheel of fortune

Unexpected animal fails
A little mustached man sits in the lap of a larger mustached man, both dwarfed in the mist of a giant spirit cloud emerging

Disgruntled employees/ entitled customers
A woman and a man and a woman have tea, the scene thaws like ice cream left out of the freezer

Revisionist history/secret stuff                 
A woman and man profiled in lamp light, the smaller head (her) is somehow closer to the viewer, the much larger head (him) farther away

Prank/karma 
A hand holds out a rose to a mirror, the mirror also reflects a nude woman in front of a window- everything that blossoms is an audience for its own bloom

Women's Day
mixed media on paper

Two Hearts
mixed media on paper

The women in the work of Shelly Turley search, but they also sleep, gather, weep and gravitate toward candlelight as if to illumine the unspoken. Sometimes they appear to melt like candles as though the burden of wisdom withers in the face of male folly. Perhaps the trade off for the capacity to nurture and maintain life's brightest spark is that the same light will make your own dissolution more visible? The selfless act of creating, of being a vessel for life itself, is equal parts burden and blessing and it is mirrored (sometimes mimicked) in every piece of art ever made. The female and male may "never meet", may only ascend together briefly and spend lifetimes working out the details but everything living or that has ever lived is canvas and paint, indulgence and restraint. Something about us is slow to ignite yet quick to burn. We are cosmoses contained and dispersed.

Final Drift
mixed media on paper

New Faces, New Friends
mixed media on paper

​This column was written in response to Shelley Turley's show Spirit Hands at One Wall Gallery that took place in October and November of 2024.
Turley will be showing work in Seattle (WA) at Snag in May, 2025, and at Helen's Costumes in Portland, Oregon in the near future.