detail: Rebecca Shippee, Girls, Girls, Girls, 2025, oil on canvas, dimensions variable.
Obsessed with forgetting what it is: Carly Sheehan and Rebecca Shippee
MAY 16 - JUNE 16
Carly Sheehan
Rebecca Shippee
North Loop West presents Obsessed with forgetting what it is, a two-person show of new work by artists Carly Sheehan and Rebecca Shippee. The exhibition will open on Friday, May 16th with a reception from 6-8pm that evening. Los Angeles-based Shippee will exhibit site-specific paintings that span the width of the gallery's walls, alongside Sheehan’s sculptural works on canvas, which incorporate materials such as memory foam, flowers, unfiltered natural pigments like indigo and cochineal, and carpet padding. Close personal friends, Sheehan and Shippee share an accumulative and process-based approach to painting, creating time-intensive works that are the products of constant revisiting.
Shippee alternates between painting and sanding to achieve incredibly smooth, wax-like surfaces of works that are directly affixed to the wall. Keeping to materials traditionally used in oil painting—canvas, gesso, oil paint—, and only slight color variations of yellow, the artist works within tight parameters to build large-scale, multilayered paintings. Shippee’s absorbing, diaphanous works have more recently moved into total abstraction: subtle and occasional moments of delicate line work hint at mysterious forms.
Sheehan takes an expansive approach to materials as she combines and transforms disparate elements scavenged online and in her local environment. Through a highly physical process, the artist cuts, sews, stretches, and stuffs soft materials into canvas to create thick, upholstered-like objects. Sheehan works on the ground as she goes between incorporating various materials into the work and washing the entire object in acrylic paint. Pools and pockets form on the surface that for the artist, evoke the puddles characteristic of rainy Seattle’s sidewalks (where she is currently based) and the tide pools she grew up exploring on the coast of her native Massachusetts. Sheehan’s built-up canvases, products of accumulation embedded with traces of daily life, are reminiscent of relics as the artist explores ideas surrounding memory and preservation.
Carly Sheehan (b. 1992, Leominster, MA) is a painter and printmaker based in Seattle, Washington. She earned her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2020 and her BFA in Art Education and Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2014. Her work has been exhibited in artist-run spaces including Triangle Projects in Los Angeles and Green Shutter House in New Haven. Sheehan is a Visiting Artist and Full-Time Lecturer in the Painting, Drawing, and Printmaking Department at the University of Washington. In 2024, she joined the artist team at Specialist Gallery in Seattle, where she helps curate and organize exhibitions and will present a solo show in summer 2025. She will also be an artist-in-residence at Surf Point in York, Maine in fall 2025.
Rebecca Shippee (b. Troy, NY) is a painter based in Los Angeles, CA. She attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2018, received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in 2020, and her BFA in Painting from Purchase College in 2023. She was a resident at Atlantic Center of the Arts where she worked with mentor Eileen Myles in 2022 and returned in 2024 to work with mentor Angela Dufresne. She has also been an artist-in-residence at Sundress Academy, Casa Ojalá, and Norfolk School of Art. She currently runs Triangle Projects, a LA-based gallery devoted to immersive art.