SHANEE ROE: SNARL BLOOM
Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present Snarl Bloom, Shanee Roe’s solo exhibition with the gallery.
June 13 – July 19, 2025
The dichotomy in Shanee Roe’s work is striking. Viewers are confronted with overtly sexual, adult themes, yet the figures themselves are quite the opposite. Her silly, clumsy characters don't evoke pornographic tension; rather, they imbue Roe’s work with a sense of charm and even endearment. Infantile, raw, and primitive, these figures explore their world with a childlike sense of wonder, as if newly born or just awakened. Their nudity recalls an original state of being and scenes that might just as well take place in the Garden of Eden.
Roe deliberately avoids glorifying her subjects. Instead, she presents them in their most honest for: deeply human and vulnerable. She questions her audience: are these scenes purposefully playful, or refreshingly naïve? Any sexual tension is disarmed by the humor inherent in her cartoonish figures; any obscenity is subdued by the tender, dreamy way in which their actions unfold. Roe challenges viewers to find beauty in unflattering imperfection, using the lightness of humor as a gateway to more easily engage with the themes in her work. Much like Philip Guston in his late figurative work, Roe uses humor to defuse seriousness and provoke thought.
Guston is a recurring influence in Roe’s oeuvre. His humorous caricatures masked deeper emotional currents and sharp social commentary, an approach Roe embraces herself as well to question and gently dismantle societal constructs. Patriarchal norms and expectations of strong male identities are challenged by revealing a more vulnerable side of her male characters. These men are stripped of conventional attributes like physical dominance or power, while their female counterparts are elevated and almost deified. This inversion is evident in works like 3 Wishes (2025), where Roe subverts gender expectations with quiet but deliberate force.
The exhibition marks a subtle departure from Roe's earlier work, embracing a more dreamy, fantastical atmosphere and sensibility. At the heart of this exhibition lies, after all, a deep yearning for connection, a desire to fill the hollow void of loneliness with unfiltered intimacy. Roe’s characters act on this impulse with the same bewildered tenderness that defines her entire body of work.