Artist Statement — Shany Porras

Abstract Harmony: Dissonance

My work operates at the intersection of sound and abstraction, using music as both catalyst and structural framework. I approach musical composition as a form of architecture—an ordered system of rhythm, tempo, harmony, and dissonance—and translate these sonic logics into a visual vocabulary of color, strata, and spatial tension. In this practice, painting becomes a site where the temporal unfolds spatially, where listening becomes a form of seeing.

Music’s capacity to generate profound emotional resonance, across languages and cultures, drives my inquiry. Rather than illustrating sound, I interpret its internal logic: phrases become intervals of color; harmonic shifts emerge as layered transparencies; disruptions in rhythm surface as ruptures, frictions, and unexpected chromatic collisions. These translations reveal an underlying question that guides my work: What does it mean to experience sound without hearing it?

My process begins with close listening—repetitive, analytical, and intuitive. I study musical scores, annotate phrases, sketch rhythmic patterns, and map emotional shifts. These drawings become notations that guide the formal structure of the paintings. Working across wood, metal, and canvas, I employ water-based and dry media to build complex surfaces that echo the layered construction of sound itself.

Dissonance plays a central role in this series. Composers such as Philip Glass and Max Richter embrace tension, divergence, and unresolved chords—qualities that, when translated visually, liberate the painting from expected harmonies. Dissonance becomes generative, allowing for color relationships and formal structures that resist ease and invite deeper consideration. In these works, harmony is not the absence of conflict but the negotiation of it.

Abstract painting offers the ideal terrain for this investigation. Freed from representational constraints, I can explore the psychological and phenomenological impact of color, line, and density—inviting viewers into an experience that mirrors listening: immersive, durational, and open to interpretation.

Ultimately, my work seeks to dissolve the boundary between auditory and visual perception. These paintings function as translations, but also as meditations—on resonance, on disruption, and on the shared human impulse to find structure, meaning, and beauty within complexity. I invite viewers to inhabit the threshold where sound becomes image, and where the emotional register of music extends into the visual field.

— Shany Porras

Artist Statement — Shany Porras

SIMPLE GIFTS: VISUAL TRANSLATIONS OF SHAKER HYMNS

This series investigates the intersection of sound and abstraction, translating musical structure into color, rhythm, and spatial tension. Simple Gifts brings together two sources deeply embedded in American cultural memory — Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring and traditional Shaker hymns — and reimagines them as contemporary visual compositions.

The Appalachian Spring series distills Copland’s shifting meters, open intervals, and evolving motifs into bold, linear abstractions. Rhythmic stripes act as visual measures, expanding or colliding in response to the score’s spacious harmonies and unexpected dissonances. Each palette is tuned to the emotional temperature of the music, capturing moments of lyricism, contrast, and clarity. Copland’s use of the Shaker melody “Simple Gifts” becomes a conceptual anchor, linking the two bodies of work.

The Shaker hymn translations introduce representational elements—drawn symbols, fragments of lyrics, and pared-down materials—integrating the Shakers’ devotion to simplicity, labor, and communal spirituality. These works maintain the underlying stripe structure while inviting a quieter, more meditative reading rooted in ritual and cultural memory.

My process is rooted in musical study: examining scores, sketching rhythmic structures, and engaging physically with the music through piano. This immersion allows me to construct a visual language in which rhythm becomes line, harmony becomes hue, and musical architecture becomes spatial form.

Situated within the lineage of artists who bridge sound and abstraction—Kandinsky, Klee, the Synchromists—my work continues the exploration of how music can shape visual experience. Simple Gifts invites viewers into a distilled, contemporary expression of American musical and spiritual heritage: spacious, intentional, and resonant.

— Shany Porras