BIO

Shannon Pawliw is a Vancouver-based artist working across painting, installation, participatory projects and conceptual practice. Her work considers systems of value, labour, identity, memory and human connection, often using humour, colour and play to draw attention to familiar objects and structures.

Pawliw holds a BFA in Studio Art from Concordia University. Her practice has developed over more than two decades and includes abstract and figurative painting, installation, public and participatory projects, and artist-led initiatives.

In 2020, Pawliw founded THIS Gallery, an independent contemporary art gallery that began as an online curatorial project and later developed into a physical exhibition space in Vancouver. Alongside its role as a functioning gallery, THIS has increasingly become an extension of Pawliw’s artistic practice, providing a framework for investigating how art is exhibited, valued, exchanged and encountered.

Pawliw also has an extensive background in graphic design, which informs her interest in visual communication, systems and the relationship between objects and their contexts.

Artist Statement

My practice moves between painting, installation, participatory projects and conceptual gestures, but much of the work begins with a similar impulse: to pay attention to the things we have learned not to notice.

I am interested in how value is created and assigned, not only monetary value, but the value we place on labour, objects, time, identity, relationships and art itself. I often begin with something ordinary or familiar and alter the conditions around it. A painting remains unfinished until someone buys it. A cardboard vending machine dispenses original artwork at deliberately arbitrary prices. A work apron becomes the subject of sustained observation. A commercial gallery becomes a space for testing how art is exhibited, exchanged and encountered.

These questions extend into the way I sell my work. Rather than assigning a single fixed price, I offer my available work on a Pay What You Can basis, establishing a minimum while allowing the buyer to determine what the work is worth to them. The transaction becomes another site where value is negotiated rather than assumed.

Humour, colour and play are important parts of this process. I am drawn to the absurdity embedded in everyday systems and to the possibilities that emerge when their rules are made visible or rearranged. Rather than treating play as an escape from serious subjects, I use it as a way of approaching them, creating room for curiosity, participation and uncertainty.

Other works turn inward, considering ageing, motherhood, memory, visibility and the shifting experience of identity over time. Across these projects, I return to questions of attention: what we choose to see, what becomes invisible through familiarity, what we decide is worth preserving, and who or what gets to determine value.

Whether I am making a painting, constructing an object, creating an exchange or operating a gallery, I think of the structures surrounding the work as part of its material. I am interested in what happens when those structures are questioned, interrupted or simply looked at long enough to become strange again.