Andrea Rosen Gallery Presents Michael St. John's COUNTRY LIFE, Today
Andrea Rosen Gallery is delighted to present Michael St. John's third Gallery 2 exhibition. Titled Country Life, the exhibition unites St. John's consistent interest in the representation of common, everyday experience with a diligent, but often playful, formal practice. It opens just before the release of St. John's first major monograph, published by Karma.This series of work represents source material as varied as 18th Century American tromp l'oeil painting by John Peto, images of women found on the internet by searching "nice racks," American presidents, and Jasper Johns' painting "In the Studio," 1982. St. John's work makes claims for the relevance of contemporary art by abandoning a hierarchy of culture and placing art equally at the center of the broader discourse with mass media.At the heart of this exhibition is the question of representation and the slippery boundary between what is real and what is not. Mimicking the "rack" paintings of Philadelphia painter John Peto, St. John employs tromp l'oeil as a metaphor for the increasingly complex nature of fact and fiction and how information is perceived, delivered, represented, and understood in the age of the internet and cable news. St. John cleverly updates the tradition of painstaking, tromp l'oeil painting by incorporating both real objects and modern reproduction (photographs and photocopies). For St. John, the process of collecting and displaying objects and images, whether done by a teenager in a bedroom or an artist in the studio, is both a means of generating a narrative about one's own identity and who we might be, or want to be, as a people. This body of work moves from the urban studio to the country but it continues St. John's investigation into how people generate meaning through commemorative acts.
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