This weekend I headed down to Ohio to see my friend John's thesis exhibit. He is graduating soon with his MFA from Ohio University and Friday was the opening for his show. John and I were both painting majors and good friends in undergrad. After graduation we headed in different directions. I went on to get another degree in Art Education right away while he took a year off to work and then applied to grad schools for fine art. John is really an amazing person to have known both personally and as an artist. His recent work is very thoughtful and draws connections between material [in this case mostly housing construction materials] and our own bodies.
In Indivisibler, textures and materials fuse together to generate a tangled field of associations between viewers’ bodies and the installation of works. Alternating between formal cohesion and material disintegration, this work traces connections between body, architecture and landscape in order to merge them into an increasingly undifferentiated mass. For instance, by noting analogous textures and functions between one’s own skin and fiberglass insulation, an uncertainty between contained body and exposed environment imposes a confusion of inside and outside. This uncertainty is amplified by the eclectic arrangement of familiar materials in which common substances collide to induce uncommon experiences.
Images by John Burt Sanders.
[PS... after Indivisibler comes down, the building materials will be reused to insulate a house.]