Shaun Wilson (born Melbourne, 1972) is an Australian artist, film maker, academic and curator working with themes of memory, place and scale through painting, miniatures and video art.
In 2002 he moved to Hobart to undertake a PhD in Philosophy and Media Arts (completed in 2005) at the University of Tasmania.
Influences are drawn from Caravaggio, Théodore Géricault, Francisco Goya, the political works of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and the butterfly paintings of Damien Hirst.
These detailed works began as a response to the role of the scaled object in contemporary art and later evolved to embrace themes of memory and place through issues and tensions between narrativity.
Materials used are both commercially manufactured model kits and scratch-built cardboard/plastic objects attached onto various types of vintage hard-cover books.
Each film is based on the reinvention of paintings and etchings by Francisco Goya and Caspar David Friedrich and adapted with Napoleonic Gothic narratives.
These are the sonic versions of a winder inquiry into memory and place with many source references appropriated from family recordings and related material.
In 2004, the track 'statica' was released as a compilation double CD 'People Doing Strange Things With Electricity Too' (1994) available on Comfortstand Records (USA) and launched at the Centre on Contemporary Art Seattle in early 2005.
In 1996, Wilson and Melbourne-based painter Monica Adams opened Indigo Studios, a private art school located in the suburb of Burwood, Melbourne.
A total of 45 exhibitions by art students and emerging artists were held in the gallery between 1997 and 2002 at the three different sites that Indigo occupied between these periods.
The third and final site was a derelict two-storey Federation shopfront and residency located in Camberwell renovated by Adams and Wilson into a two-gallery floor space with studios and accommodation upstairs.
These include Australian Gothic (2007) at Project Space/Spare Room, Melbourne and the Directors Lounge, Berlin (2007) and Post-Cinema touring Australia and Germany in 2007 and 2008.
In 2005, Wilson wrote a series of lectures delivered in his 'Media Cultures' course at RMIT University which explored the evolution of technology through modernity and postmodernity.
These formed the basis of further articles exploring the histo-philosophical nature of digital media, especially MP3 and iPod culture, as evidenced in the forthcoming e-book Post-Pod available in 2008.
This will be donated in 2017 to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and Rhizome as a major filmic collection of international significance.
In 2006 he was the Program Coordinator of Higher Degrees by Research (MA and PhD) in the School of Creative Media at RMIT University, Melbourne (City) campus.