PLATO is thrilled to announce Stass Shpanin's solo exhibition, Forbidden Garden. The Philadelphia-based, USSR-born artist focuses on interpretations and fabrications of the past that reverberate in the present. His hand-painted canvases combine centuries-old American folk imagery–namely Pennsylvania German fraktur–with AI technology, to deconstruct the vocabulary of myth-making and examine the visual mechanisms affecting public memory. In his solo exhibition, Shpanin fuses Biblical references and archetypal imagery–the garden, the serpent, the eagle and angels, alongside portraits of real and imaginary figures in faux-naive graphic style, to peek beneath the blissful surface of the American idyll and to probe the accidental and intentional mechanisms behind its creation.
