NYAB Event - John Seal Exhibition

John Seal Exhibition

Gavin Brown (291 Grand St.)

This event has ended.

A porcelain face stares out at us from the canvas. She stares out across a gap of more than two centuries, yet is also synchronous with us, now. Her gaze falls upon a field of possibilities, other paintings, other propositions. They are planets swimming in the half-known wilderness: dialogic space, aesthetic ether. They wait to be inhabited, colonized, stripped of their precious minerals and cast off. They wait to be loved, appreciated, built upon, and cared for.

We have our own worlds, and we know that others have had theirs. The gap between them is the space of interpretation, and it is the gap through which we flow into our own lives. Looking at other’s lives, looking at histories, makes us feel less lonely - so long as those histories are treated like a friend, so long as we are prepared to aplogize when they begin to cry, and can explain in all honesty that we are laughing with them not at them.

Paint gets squished and squeezed. Sometimes it is squished and squeezed into something specific. Sometimes it becomes merely what it is - or almost. There is always the threat or ghost of the specific; an intimated something lurking in the dark, hiding behind the couch when the lights are off. Don’t we always wish to find a name for our joy, a form to our fears?

The specter in a cape of many colors moves from canvas to canvas. She is the host of a party introducing guests that have little in common, but the awkwardness of their introduction leaves them little choice but to bicker the evening away. The meeting leaves their lives forever changed, and their argument is a life in its own right, as eternal as you or me.

- John Seal

John Seal received his MFA from the University of Southern California in 2011 and his BA from Bard College in 2008. His work has recently been included in exhibitions at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. In the summer of 2011 he was in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.