Raphaele Shirley is a multi-media artist whose work spans installation art, light sculpture, video, art collectives, live performances and social intervention. Her work deals with questions of space, time, primordial life forces, and the ephemeral. Since her beginnings in New York City, where she currently lives and works, she has been instrumental in the creation of several large-scale social projects such as Perpetual Art Machine and the New York International Fringe Festival. She has been awarded several grants recently from the Norwegian arts council for commissioned public and video works. Several of the projects she has been involved in have received international acclaimed awards. She shows her work nationally and internationally. She has worked in collaboration with renowned artists and directors such as Aaron Beall, Karin Coonrod, Elaine Summers, Richard Foreman, Dino Lupelli, Randolph Curtis Rand and Gh Hovagimyan. For live performances she has collaborated with the following musicians: Rhys Chatham, David Watson, Peter Zummo, Kevin Shea, Laura Ortman, Algis Kizys, Vincent Signorelli, Lynn Wright, Eric Hubel, Katarina Raska and Anna Liisa Eller.
Early life
Raphaele Shirley is daughter of Hunter B. Shirley, the renowned psychologist and theoretician, and Anne Couelle from the French Couelle family, known for their reconstruction of churches, export of historical churches including part of the New York cityCloisters, stone quarry and architecture. She is the youngest of three children. She moved to Aix-en-Provence in her early teens and began to explore sculpture, photography and other art forms through elective art courses. In the early 90s, she enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux Arts of Aix-en-Provence, France.
Training
Between 1997 and 2002, she worked as a studio assistant for Nam June Paik, the US-based Korean artist and founder of video art, assisting him in the development with Norman Ballard of a number of public laser works displayed at the Olympic Park Lake in Seoul, Korea and in his Retrospective "The Worlds of Nam June Paik" at the S.R.Guggenheim, New York U.S.A. and Bilbao, Spain. She also participated in the construction, installation and take down of numerous of his CRT-based sculptures including "Tv Fish", "The Megatron", "Tv Garden". Since 2005 she has been an active contributor for the restoration and preservation of Nam June Paik CRt based art works for Museums around the world. She has extended her efforts in collaboration with CTL Electronics Inc. to help museums and private collections in the restoration of numerous new media artworks of artists such as Bruce Nauman, Diana Thater, Gary Hill, Bill Viola, Robert Irwin to name a few.
Curator/Social Interventions
In 1997, Shirley was a founding member of The New York International Fringe Festival and co-directed Fringe Al Fresco up until 2001, which staged over 100 artists for the first two years of the festival in public locations all over the Lower East Side in New York. From 2002-2004, with director and impresario Aaron Beall, she founded the Times SquareArts Center, installed in the former notorious Adult entertainment center on 42nd and 8th avenue in New York called "Show World", where over 100 performances, screenings and installations were organized. In 2005 she co-founded the project Perpetual Art Machine, an interactive installation and video art collective of over 2000 members and video artists. presented over 50 exhibitions drawing from the video art collective worldwide.
Body of work
In 2008 Shirley began sculpting in pure light. Light Shot 0910 explores the spirituality of geometry through two mysterious rectangles of light intersecting in mid-air, shown in a solo exhibit at the Chelsea Art Museum. Shooting Stair uses light diodes and high-pressured mist to form a staircase made of light, installed outdoors in a private collection in Southampton, New York. Light and geography intersect powerfully with community in two recently commissioned public pieces which brought Shirley to Norway, the first a massive outdoor light sculpture, the second a film. Jewels of Kvinesdal, dramatically overlooking the Kvinesdal fjord, consists of an open-air arena from which a diagonal tower of light beams into the night sky, visible to communities many kilometers away. This installation was curated by Torill Haugen at the Utsikten Kunstsenter Art Center in Kvinesdal, Norway. Stargaze in Sandnes is a 14-minute film combining communal and geologic memory, past and future, utopia and dystopia, employing topographical maps, 3D animation, and old family films provided by the people of Sandnes, Norway. This project was funded by Norway's KinoKino Art center and the Norwegian Arts Council. Here work was shown alongside Gustave Deutsch and Bjorn Melhus' commissioned work. The exhibition was toured to The Museum of Moving Image in New York. During The Arctic Circle, a residency led by the FARM Foundation, Shirley created a series of immersive earth and light works while sailing the Arctic, documented in a series of photographic prints. Her Norway and Arctic expeditions were preceded by her similarly experiential ‘’Sunken City’’ projects. For these installations Shirley used silicone and bronze, bathed in lasers, fog and dense soundscapes, to create a language of architecture and urban space both ancient and futuristic, terrifying and utopian. These were exhibited in Basel, New York, and Brooklyn. Shirley solo and collaborative projects have also been exhibited at the in Estonia,The Queens Museum, Museum of Moving Image, the former Chelsea Art Museum, New York, USA, the Moscow Biennale, New York, the Video Lounge at ArtBasel Miami 2006, and The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg Russia. Raphaele Shirley lives in Brooklyn, New York.
