All images courtesy of the artist
Artist Shawn Kolodny transforms personal battles into provocative art.
Emerging with a highly sought after, provocative series of the year Shawn Kolodny's gives you something to talk about. Drawing from a life spent amongst substance, addiction and materialism, as the owner and operator of New York City’s most prominent nightclubs, he has been both the observer and the subject. For Kolodny, addiction is a pathological relationship in which things replace self.
Shawn Kolodny has emerged with one of the most provocative and discussed series of the year. Drawing from a life spent amongst substance, addiction and materialism, as the owner and operator of New York City’s most prominent nightclubs, he has been both the observer and the subject. For Kolodny, addiction is a pathological relationship in which things replace self.
Kolodny’s work confronts the infinite cycle of fake fulfillment shaped by modern society’s addiction to ego, using the most sought-after brands and the most addictive drugs as a visual medium.
Fascinated by drugs and our need to find chemical solutions to improve, regulate and fix ourselves. Kolodny transcribes those very solutions, finding beauty in the connection between actual pharmaceuticals and their underlying compounds, HE attempts to demonstrate the contradiction of clean and sterile science with often messy results.
From popping bottles with celebrities to sporting paint covered jeans, Shawn Kolodny quit his high-paying profession in hospitality to pursue a fulfilling life as an artist. Now with a breakout career as a contemporary pop artist.
Shawn Kolodny (born 1971) is an American artist, living and working in Manhattan, New York and Miami, Florida. Kolodny received his Bachelor of Industrial Design from Syracuse University in 1994 and his MBA from Stern School of Business in 2010.
"We often look at people on drugs and think poorly of them, yet most of us are addicted to something.
Whether it be luxury goods, social media, music, sports, even air to name a few,
we look to fill the emptiness in our lives with stuff.
This grows into dependence with withdrawal symptoms similar to real drugs.
The message I am trying to get across is that there is only one fix for the emptiness and the pain—the cure is you.
I hope I get people to think about their own addictions for a second.
We so often blaze through life not realizing what we’re hooked on. It’s meant to take you a little deeper and think ‘
what am I addicted to?’
~ Shawn Kolodny
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