Duaa and Shannon

Statement

Duaa Bilbeisi (Jordan)

Duaa is an expressionist who aims to spread humanitarian thoughts through visual media. Focusing on community engagement, Duaa guides people to express unseen suffering – lifting the individual voice, and in turn, lifting the collective.

From a personal perspective, Duaa found her own voice through digital and traditional paint to release the stress of daily life over the past twenty years. This long journey of self discovery has shown her how to survive and she wants to raise others along with her on this process.

Shannon Castor (United States)

Drawing from fauvism and expressionism Shannon reflects her interior landscapes onto paper with acrylic paint. Her practice of long distance running rises these interior images to the surface, bringing forward the subconscious psyche, a surreal combination of internal and external perceptions.

As an ultrarunner, Shannon has discovered that for her, fatigue provides a release of mental weight. An increased circulation of stuck sludge to be lifted and cleared like toxins of the liver. Through the translation or expressions produced in her paintings, she gains a sense of calm.

GlogauAIR Project

Duaa Bilbeisi and Shannon Castor are a collaborative team that work with themes of fear, anxiety, healing and the release of emotions. Prompted by text, they choose a word for each collaboration and respond, pulling from their gut. With color slapping the page, they purge trapped energy, raw in its most immediate form. Duaa’s strong bold lines, Shannon’s interior landscapes, slip and twirl around each other. A psyche feathering melding of minds, they heal like clasping hands. They reveal. They go one by one. Every emotion unearthed and painted. Excavated from the soul. A story is told.

It is Duaa and Shannon’s goal for their time with GlogauAIR to develop an art book that tracks their journey together. The aim of their book is to inspire others to use art as a means of healing. They believe art has a power of peace and they want to spread this peace to anyone and everyone who is exposed to this artistic collaboration between friends.

Drawing and Painting

CV Summary

Duaa Bilbeisi

Education

• 2023 Healing through Art Workshop
• 2022 Healing through Art Workshop
• 2020 Post Baccalaureate at the Burren College of Art, National University of Galway, Ireland

Shannon Castor

Education

• 2021 MFA in Art and Ecology at the Burren College of Art, National University of Galway, Ireland
• 2019 BFA in Cross Media at the Oregon College of Art and Craft

Group Exhibitions

• 2023 Van Der Plas Gallery, NYC
• 2021 CICA Art Museum, South Korea
• Oregon Center for Contemporary Art, OR
• Rhyolite Gallery, CO
• Graduate Show, Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughan Ireland
• 2020 Interim Show, Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughan Ireland
• Nua Collective, Online, Ireland
• Westival Gallery, Westport, Ireland
• Refiguring the Portrait, NUIG Ireland
• 2019 Disjecta Gallery, OR
• 2016 Mount Hood Community College, OR
• Hoffman Gallery, OR
• Centrum Gallery, OR

Residencies

• 2023 Takt Leipzig

Awards and Scholarships

• 2019 Burren College of Art Merit Scholarship
• 2018 Gamblin Paint Award for Outstanding Artistic Achievement in Oil Painting
• 2016 Oregon College of Art and Craft President’s Scholarship

Gallery