The Bastion Art Gallery presents Naked, an exhibition inspired by Shannon McGill’s first literary collection, Naked, the exhibit will include Kat Wilson’s signature #SelfieThrone and artistic interpretations of McGill’s poetry with gallery design by Annabell Larsh. Naked will culminate in a reception on Saturday, November 16 from 6 to 10 P.M., featuring live body art with Courtney Youphoriafy, and poetry in bed with Isabella Marianna Barrios, Schuyler Brooks, and Hayleigh Worgan. 

Naked is a collection of poetry, short fiction, and memoir. It’s raw and uncensored approach breathes new life in what it means to be a woman. Through McGill’s fearless delivery, the reader is presented with nakedness as a shameless state. The reader is inspired to examine their own reflection and discover what empowers them beneath the shield they wear every day.

“This is event is important to me because it is giving me an opportunity to share a hat that a mother doesn’t often get to wear, and it also is set up in a way where the true masterpiece is the person looking in the mirror,” McGill explains.

About Shannon McGill
Shannon McGill was born in Killeen, Texas and spent the first years of her life on an army base in Nuremberg, Germany. She grew up in Bixby, Oklahoma and attended college at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and University of Arkansas – Fort Smith. She is mother to three boys and a Yorkie-poo named Achilles and currently resides in Fort Smith where she spends her free time supporting and attending local art events, practicing yoga and running her blog /podcast “Out Loud with Shannon.”

About Kat Wilson
Kat Wilson is the cover photographer for Naked, and her #SelfieThrone will have a prominent position at this exhibit. Theatrical, participatory, and humanistic, Wilson’s work often involves collaboration with others, including, in many of her photography projects, the subjects of the photos themselves. She sees her artistic role as that of a medium. Channeling different modes of communication across time, her photography, paintings, and installations move within and between of-the-present lexicons like the selfie and the emoji and centuries-old compositional techniques to lend a sense of the metaphysical to familiar objects and spaces. Her greatest achievements are when her works communicate indiscriminately to the public.

About the #Selfie Throne
A sort of open-access expansion on artist Kat Wilson’s Habitats series, her #SelfieThrone is an interactive art project that employs elements of photography, sculpture, and performance art to explore the line between self-empowerment and self-obsession made blurrier by social media. Wilson is present as an artist in the construction of the thrones, which she composes from neon, projection mapping, and curated personal objects before stepping away from her typical role as photographer, inviting anyone who passes by to participate in a spectacle of beauty and grandeur using their own phones. Playful and dynamic, #SelfieThrone offers a complex commentary on portraiture in the age of Instagram, redefining the role of the photographer and welcoming the in-person performance of ego and its sister self-love.

For more information on Naked, visit www.outloudwithshannon.com.

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