Jurij Krpan: I've seen some early projects dealing with sugar and sweets in your portfolio, but exhibition of chocolates named " Unknown Resurrections " showed in Kapelica Gallery is not alike to any of them. Why you decided to overexpose the almost banal material of chocolate with such a radical topics? Was that fact also a statement considering your former, much easier works?
Stephen j Shanabrook: It is exactly the banality of the chocolate that makes the image so powerful because the viewer is caught off guard. The familiarity, smell and the hidden psychological effect of chocolate are the most influential aspect of the morgue chocolate series. By exhibiting wounds in a chocolate box motif, the mold of a shotgun wound to the face becomes desirable to the viewer. Even though one would not admit it, the desire is there, and so begins the conflict for the viewer. This smell is overpowering to the point were one can not come to grips with what one is seeing. So much so that you begin to wonder what you are really looking at. How is it that we should desire to eat the representation of another’s pain. The chocolates are made in sense to be digested mentally or physically removed for the living to process again, but not to acquaint us with death per say but to nourish life, in the sense of connection to. " Consumption alone has become the manner in which life is sustained. In this state life's processes can not come full circle. Upended in a single direction, movements both physical and psychological become stilted and reactionary." (from " Morgue Chocolates" series statement SjS ).
Furthermore, chocolate and blood function at similar temperatures and as fluids they both have come down through history as offerings to the gods or at least as remedies for curing some inner melancholy.
An insight into why Shanabrook uses unusual and original materials, such as chocolate, cotton candy amongst others, from his own point of view.
