East City Art – Conner Contemporary Art’s Upcoming Show

This East City Art posts previews the upcoming show at Connor Contemporary Art. It will feature John Kirchner’s Infinity, John Stark’s Mercurial Complex, and Susan McWilliam’s Video. An excerpt:

“Conner Contemporary Art will present three concurrent solo exhibitions featuring a sculptural installation and opening night performance by John Kirchner, a new cycle of oil paintings by John Stark and recent video by Susan MacWilliam.

JOHN KIRCHNER

Infinity is a large-scale sculpture installation by John Kirchner. To create his 4th solo exhibition with the gallery, the DC-based artist physically and metaphorically deconstructs a 26 foot boat. The Chris-Craft cabin cruiser, named ‘Infinity’, was built and marketed in 1955, the year of Kirchner’s birth. Reconstructing the vessel in the exhibition space, Kirchner re-interprets the boat’s social symbolism, turning the American dream, and the world-view that gave rise to it, on its head.

Kirchner converses with certain artistic traditions as he transforms the pleasure cruiser from a faded symbol of status and progress into a monumental parable about human nature. Known for making irreverent interventions with historied objects, Kirchner often draws upon the conceptualism of Surrealism and Arte Povera. In his new work, he explores the themes of power and vulnerability in Hieronymus Bosch’s parody of the Ship of Fools and Michelangelo’s depiction of The Deluge in the Sistine Chapel.

Presenting a live performance in the gallery during the opening night reception, Kirchner will confront viewers with a provocative allegory of the human condition.

JOHN STARK

Mercurius Duplex is John Stark’s first solo exhibition in the U.S. An innovator in the dark undercurrent of London’s contemporary art scene, Stark integrates styles and themes from recent and past artistic traditions to form his own system of meaning. The London-based artist makes his much anticipated American debut with a powerful new series of paintings in oil on wood panel.

The show’s title, meaning ‘Dual Mercury,’ reflects the artist’s conception of his work as a Mercurial marriage of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. Stark’s paintings contain a world of desolate landscapes, imaginary destinations appearing at moments in crisp, exacting detail, only to dissolve into light or mist elsewhere. Never giving away too much information, or surrendering to academic formulas, he converses easily with traditions of landscape and figure painting, while also evoking colorful sci-fi posters, or sublime filmic vistas.

Stark presents us, in one painting, with a spare, moonlit terrain that echoes the cool stillness of Caspar David Friedrich. In another, he conjures the cosmic symbolism of Albrecht Altdorfer and Matthias Grunewald, painting a vivid sunrise, glowing with otherworldly colors, and lit with hints of meteorological phenomena. Stark updates these German masters with pop culture references, populating his unattainable, foreboding spaces with skulls and grim, hooded figures, which can read dually, as memento mori, or as death/metal insignia.”

Click here to read the complete post. Visit the gallery’s website here to learn more about the exhibit.

Image in the post is John Stark’s The Fall, from the East City Art post.