In the Garden 2020, acrylic on canvas 40 x 30 inches
Diamond-silk spiderwebs glisten out of an impossible blackness. An anonymous pale hand carries a drippy wax candlestick through the undergrowth. A cob-webbed clearing in a dark forest hosts shimmering pink daemons. The work presented in Will Sheldon’s solo show, “Trouble After Dark,” digitally on-view at Team Gallery until May 30th, is like The Nightmare Before Springtime, a world glittering in its own dew as death coagulates into life. The collective surge in insomnia and vivid dreams of the present moment imbue Sheldon’s work with a heightened emotional significance—his neo-gothic aesthetic and apocalyptic-pastoral agenda offer a dreamy genre of suspense, where anxiety, terror, and visual splendour are thorny and entwined. Sheldon’s is the kind of world you enter on the other side of sleep, with thick brush and gardens vibrant under night’s cover, a magic place of deep shadow teeming with quiet, luminescent life. – Olivia Whittick
Installation shot
Candle in the Forest, 2019 acrylic on canvas 50 x 40 inches
Will Sheldon Trouble After Dark
In the Garden
2020, acrylic on canvas
40 x 30 inches
Diamond-silk spiderwebs glisten out of an impossible blackness. An anonymous pale hand carries a drippy wax candlestick through the undergrowth. A cob-webbed clearing in a dark forest hosts shimmering pink daemons. The work presented in Will Sheldon’s solo show, “Trouble After Dark,” digitally on-view at Team Gallery until May 30th, is like The Nightmare Before Springtime, a world glittering in its own dew as death coagulates into life. The collective surge in insomnia and vivid dreams of the present moment imbue Sheldon’s work with a heightened emotional significance—his neo-gothic aesthetic and apocalyptic-pastoral agenda offer a dreamy genre of suspense, where anxiety, terror, and visual splendour are thorny and entwined. Sheldon’s is the kind of world you enter on the other side of sleep, with thick brush and gardens vibrant under night’s cover, a magic place of deep shadow teeming with quiet, luminescent life. – Olivia Whittick
Installation shot
Candle in the Forest, 2019 acrylic on canvas
50 x 40 inches
Web, 2019
acrylic on canvas
69 x 55 inches
Heart Gate, 2019
acrylic on canvas
51 x 55 inches