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For the series titled Cut And Paste, Stephen Sheffield culled pieces from a much larger body of work he began making on January 1, 2017, that includes over 800 finished pieces. The work selected was made since January 2019. He chose to edit from his most recent work because he is interested in its sense of immediacy, and its relevance to the current news cycle. “I work intuitively before dawn in the solitude of my studio while listening to news radio, drawing from the topics from each specific day. Every piece is begun and finished, dated and signed on that one day, often before I see my children off to school”.
“I draw my material from a purposefully specific decade of LIFE Magazine and limit myself to a 14x11” format. The decade just before my own birth, the 1950s, and this era’s LIFE Magazines represent, to me, what has been perceived to be an ideal time. In this work I explore the ideal façade presented in the advertisements vs the unease I read in the articles. I attempt to subvert that ideal and use the past unease, while at the same time drawing a parallel to our own unease in the late 2010s. Within this process I cannot help but instill my own humor and anxiety of modern manhood and parenthood with image juxtaposition and the inexact process of cutting with a scalpel, and fixing the paper with glue” Stephen Sheffield.
