Shantz was intrigued by one of several two-dimensional photos of Japanese Banko-wear teapots [in the collection of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria] that capture and animate the playful image of badger, sparrow and other animals. Her investigative challenge was led by a recurring question: what happens to form when limited visual information (as 2D documentation of an artifact) is translated and applied to a specific and rapidly evolving technology for 3D form building? (Kent Archer & Wayne Baerwaldt, Directors/Curators, in “Foreword: Translating Artifacts” in Susan Shantz: Creatures in Translation)

Solo Exhibitions:

creatures in translation, Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre, Medicine Hat, AB 2015

creatures in translation, Illingworth Kerr Gallery, AB 2014

creatures in translation, Kenderdine Art Gallery, SK 2013

creatures in translation, Dunlop Art Gallery, SK 2012

Selected Works in Group Exhibitions:

creatures in translation (selected works in “The Darkest Part of the Forest”), Art Gallery of Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia 2012

creatures in translation (selected works in “Art-O-Matic”), Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, Waterloo, ON 2013

Works in Collections:

SK Arts Permanent Collection, Regina, Saskatchewan

Regina Public Library/Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina, Saskatchewan

University of Saskatchewan Permanent Collection, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, Waterloo, Ontario

Articles: Creatures in Translation (2013 & 2012):

https://news.usask.ca/articles/general/2013/the-art-of-translation.php

https://www.musingaboutmud.com/2012/04/29/susan-shantz-creatures-in-translation/

Publications:

Kent Archer & Wayne Baerwaldt, Directors/Curators, “Foreword: Translating Artifacts” in Susan Shantz: Creatures in Translation, KAG/ACAD/Esplanade, 2013 + link to full catalogue pdf

“Shantz began her investigative process with a challenging proposition to address the changing value of the artifact as replica and the limits of referentiality. She began her search with the website of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’ which re-presents a cross-section of the gallery’s art collection in a digital format. Shantz was intrigued by one of several two-dimensional photos of Japanese Banko- wear teapots that capture and animate the playful image of badger, sparrow and other animals. Her investigative challenge was led by a recurring question: what happens to form when limited visual information (as 2D documentation of an artifact) is translated and applied to a specific and rapidly evolving technology for 3D form building? … While the general level of accuracy in delivering a teapot of semi-translucent faux porcelain is uncanny, Shantz was not interested in realizing an exact replica. Imperfections and deviations from the exact replica gave her much pleasure and fed her interest in referentiality, the limits of the derivative and systems of imminent collapse and failure.”

“creatures in translation teems with life, mammalian and amphibious, avian and marine. The works swarm from frame and flatness as from the egg or the primordial soup. Ranging from the endearingly miniature to the dauntingly enlarged, they are at once comical and uncanny, playful and eerie. But nothing actually moves in the room. All is completely static. One observes that Susan Shantz's two- and three-dimensional creatures are dissected and pinned, sliced and sampled, secured with steel knobs and encased behind glass.”

Joanne Marion, “Invention, Error, and Evolution: Susan Shantz’s creatures in translation” in Susan Shantz: Creatures in Translation, KAG/ACAD/Esplanade, 2013 + link to Marion full essay pdf

In Shantz's elegant and engaging laboratory research is in progress: some works are complete, some partially underway, still others at the notational stage, germs of ideas. The liveliness which permeates the exhibition is new for Shantz, stemming from her expansive exploration of the creative and educational potential of fast-developing digital 2D and 3D imaging and printing technologies. It springs too from her creative entanglement with process, her embrace of the errors, mistakes, and failures inherent in these otherwise mordant processes of replication and iteration.

Bruce Russell, “Susan Shantz: Polytypes” in Susan Shantz: Creatures in Translation, KAG/ACAD/Esplanade, 2013 + link to full Russell essay pdf

Shantz’s new work demonstrates that “real” works of art can now be readily replicated, cloned as it were, from their cataloging data and manipulated into a plurality of new works … the artifact has become vulnerable to replication or distortion; the prototype becomes a polytype. But this is not necessarily something to be feared, as originality is no longer invested in the original but now blossoms in the diversity of the variations which derive from it. […] While Shantz’ past work has considered aspects of fine art and craft, through appropriated domestic objects refracted through a feminist valorization of women’s creative work, there is a deeper ambivalence in creatures in translation. This is not nostalgia for a lost authenticity, Baudrillard’s melancholic perspective that can plague art/craft polemics. Rather what is evident here is a keen delight in the potential of these new technologies, which offer limitless possibilities for playful exploration. Like the abbot Toba Sojo, Shantz’s humor informs her exuberant response to her subject matter – these wild creatures formed into domestic teapots. Hers is a gentle interrogation of the aura of the art commodity in a time when fashion, media and industry are ever-increasingly aligned. The resulting work is sophisticated, witty and charming, not only employing new technologies, but profoundly engaging with their ramifications.”

Diana Sherlock, “A Third Space, X–Y–Z” in Susan Shantz: Creatures in Translation, KAG/ACAD/Esplanade, 2013 +  link to full Sherlock essay pdf

Within creatures in translation, Shantz uses digital haptic technology to open up a thirdspace between body and mind, the tactile and the virtual, to create a point of intersection between subjective interpretive processes and seemingly objective technologies, and to level hierarchies between conceptual and material, digital and non-digital practices […] In her rereading of image into object, of remediating old media into new media and back again, Shantz stays particularly attuned to the glitch—errors and miscalculations that occur in translation—choosing to show these unexpected accidents encountered during the creative process […] In creatures in translations too, the glitch signals an unexpected interruption to the relentless repetition of modernist progress and technological certainty to open up an ambiguous space, a thirdspace … These glitches, or failures in translation, reveal technology’s inability to fully perceive and translate certain types of knowledge, but this lack opens up rich epistemological territory to be explored. Failure itself becomes productive and presents potential for new knowledge.”

Dunlop Art Gallery publication (DAG Volumes No. 1, 2012) Susan Shantz: Creatures in Translation + link to pdf of chapter by Carle Steel