There is a wonderfully vulgar Jewish joke about a Polish- Jewish wife, tired after a hard day’s work; when her husband
comes home, also tired, but horny, he tells her: “I cannot make love to you now, but I need a release — can you suck me
and swallow my sperm? That would help me a lot!”The wife relies: “I am too tired to do that now darling — why don’t you just masturbate into a glass, and I will drink it in the morning!”

Does this wife — contrary to the cliché about the holistic-intuitive reasoning of women as opposed to the masculine rational analysis — not provide an example of the ruthless feminine use of Understanding, of its power to separate what naturally belongs together?

— Slavoj Zizek, “Zizek’s Jokes: (Did you hear the one about Hegel and negation?),” 2014

DAN SHAW-TOWN lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA from Goldsmiths, London. Solo exhibitions in the USA and Europe include Team Gallery, New York; China Art Objects, Los Angeles; Seventeen, London; Maisterravalbuena, Madrid; Unosunove, Rome; Christopher Crescent, Brussels; and ROOM EAST, New York, where he also participated in a two-person exhibition with Ben Schumacher. A selection of his work was included in the group exhibition “Graphite” at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, for which an interview with Mara Hoberman was published in the exhibition catalogue. Shaw-Town has exhibited twice at Lisson Gallery, London; was included in a group exhibition at Marianne Boesky, New York and has work in the Zabludowicz Collection. This is his second solo exhibition at ROOM EAST.

For downloadable exhibition material, click here.