Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia is pleased to present Slow Grooming, a solo exhibition featuring new works by Shelby Donnelly.

In her most recent body of work, Shelby Donnelly explores the concept of grooming. To groom a person or a thing is to manipulate over a period of time, suppressing its natural state in favor of some intended improvement. The work explores this idea on multiple levels.

Donnelly coaxes garments through unconventional tailoring techniques, constructs fabric collages with actual self-grooming materials like Pinaud powder, and directs live performers in tableaux vivants (living pictures), where the subjects act out hierarchical relationships. Each of these outlets presents an aspiration for wealth through the disguise of mock affluence.

In a nod to their inherent relationship to fashion, the objects in Slow Grooming are displayed in a “boutique” environment. Titles are hidden within the structures of the objects themselves, and keys are attached to the objects listing the “price as marked”: a signal to own.  Slow Grooming exposes the influence of an outside dominant structure – such as the artist herself – grooming the art objects through role-playing rituals, both mysterious and familiar.

Shelby Donnelly is an interdisciplinary visual artist and educator.

Donnelly makes screen printed and sewn textiles, garments, and objects that are contextualized within videos and installations.

Her work stages dramas that come from observing humanity’s relationship with ritual, ceremony, and spirituality and how that plays out in everyday existence. Incorporating fragments from cultural sources (film, novels, news) and materials (fabric, paper) her work is a visual response or way of “materializing gestures”-making physical what is typically a fleeting moment in time.

Donnelly has exhibited both internationally and nationally at International House Philadelphia’s Ibrahim Theater, The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Haus der Kunst Museum.

Donnelly was the 2014 recipient of the Independence Foundation Artist Fellowship and traveled to Morocco to co-curate an exhibition at TALIM. Donnelly attended artist residencies at Millay Artist Colony Austerlitz, NY, the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, FR, Soaring Gardens, Laceyville, PA, and Second State Press in Philadelphia, PA. Donnelly holds a B.F.A in Printmaking and Drawing from Washington University in St. Louis (2002) and a M.F.A in Material Studies from Tyler School of Art, Temple University (2008).

Shelby Donnelly lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.