Giovanni’s Room is pleased to present an exhibition of new artworks by Ethan Shaw. This is the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery in Los Angeles.

The buttons are missing their apertures,

which is a polite way of saying

they are completely naked

and have given up all pretension

of holding anyone together.

To lose a function is not a tragedy;

Even the starch gave up and turned to timber—

shirts built like doors that refuse to open.

Pins operate on a larger scale of caution:

swollen past domestic duty,

too tall to fasten a hem,

they no longer pierce—

they merely mark where the wall begins to lean.

A shoe no longer interested in walking

settles into the quiet, curved habit

of a vessel.

It sits there like a minor clerk

who took off his trousers at the desk

because the light was too beautiful to resist,

blushing behind a thin stack of pending files.

What is infrastructure,

if not an itch that survived the body?

---

Ethan Shaw (b. 1999, Los Angeles, CA) is a visual artist living and working in Los Angeles. Working across sculpture, installation, and assemblage, Shaw explores the friction between time, material, and misplaced information. His practice operates through acts of taking apart, exposing, and reassembling—stripping functional objects and hardware of their authority until utility gives way to a vulnerable, self-referential animacy. Rather than offering resolution, Shaw’s work holds language and substance at a slant, creating phenomenological arenas where process remains visible, traditions seep, and objects sit with their own undoing. Shaw holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles.