It is interesting to view Shannon Belkin's show, 'Nature's Prozac,' because within this body of work one can witness a transformation within the artist's interior life made explicitly manifest in her work. A distinct shift has occurred here. Until recently Belkin has been painting traditional still lives without a strong and pronounced critical distance...and yet now she has one—how does one define or classify this change?

Psychiatrist and author Oliver Sacks has noted a certain type of patient possessing either traumatic or organic brain damage which ahs left said patient, one might say, without an 'OFF' button. This is to say, this type of patient lives in a world with a five-minute repeat cycle. This patient will be funny, garrulous and chatty, and will win you over completely upon first encounter—an yet five minutes later this patient will have forgotten you, and will again begin the jokey, noisy and (it must be noted) sincere process of winning you over from scratch. Such a patient is particularly frustrating because within this five-minute loop, he or she is smart, loving and likeable—but gone is any hope of persistent memory, or a genuine ongoing spiritual, moral or intellectual evolution.

I mention this type of patient because in one way he or she acts as an eerie metaphor for the media environment within post-industrial late capitalist society—the damaged attention span—the fathomless need to win one over and seduce. Television, magazines and the Internet all become crystallized within a singular organic pathology. Sacks notes that within this pathology, solace is located only in two sources—within the setting of the church where the air is intrinsically tinged with a sense of holiness and dramaŅor within the garden where the forms and cycles of nature temporarily salve the spirit.

Belkin has, up until recently, been painting her imagery intuitively and has developed a technical proficiency. But somewhere inside her new body of work she has made the critical connection between humanity and nature—the ability of heightened nature, (expressed within the size and detail of the painting,) to harness, redirect and calm the overloaded mind. Belkin acknowledges that recent life event have brought her more clearly into a relationship with health and illness, youth and aging, gain and loss. In an obvious sense this is reflected in the blooming cycles of various flowers depicted in her works. One can become lost looking inside the almost scientific detail, which she paints—the work of Chuck Close or Richard Estes and photorealists is brought to mind.

And yet there is a sense of impatience here, too. A refocusing has obviously begun in Belkin's mind, rendering her new work charged with both a sense of mission and the air of wanting to find a new destination quickly. One suspects that her next body of work will take us closer to this destination and may not, in the end, utilize a floral or super-representational strategy, but may use entirely new techniques altogether. Belkin is both an end and beginning; this is always the most interesting point in any artist's evolution.

Douglas Coupland, 2001