Michael St. John

These days

September 19, 2020 - January 2, 2021

de boer gallery and Pio Pico gallery are pleased to announce their collaboration and co-presentation of Michael St. John’s Democracy Portraits paintings that will run from 19 September through 2 January 2021. The exhibition will present a selection of paintings as an evolving national portrait as pictured from the margins. The exhibition will span across the neighboring galleries that share the address 3311 E. Pico Blvd., cross streets E. Olympic and S. Lorena, about a mile east of S. Santa Fe Ave. The galleries will publish a limited edition catalog to accompany the exhibition.

Michael St. John has been making paintings of identical format and widely varying subject matter, media, and medium as part of his “Democracy” series since the election in 2016. This body of work manifests themes of documentary long central to St. John’s practice, filtering culturally significant and insignificant flotsam to aggregate an American iconography well-versed in prosaic violence. The impulse to collect and record is reflected in the artist’s active chronicle of the revolving door of news and history, a sustained accounting of cruelty and indifference as filtered through the impulse-buy products and magazines.

St. John’s work conveys a sustained commitment to observing and re-presenting experiences of the everyday. Gathering source materials by casting an inclusive and penetrating gaze on our nation, St. John layers newspaper clippings, found images, fragmented language and everyday objects into captivating portraits of America at present. St. John’s efficient and deft faculty as a painter is equaled by the masterfully stark formal reduction with which he isolates and strips bare of symbols and imagery.

In an essay on St. John, Christian Rattemeyer contextualizes his work in relation to Richard Hofstadter’s term “the paranoid style,” “an encompassing philosophy of exceptionalism and moral absolutism laced with violence, sexual energy, and renegade redemption. [It] reared its head at a time when St. John was coming of age–during a period of genuine social change and unrest, the civil rights movement, and political assassinations.” This background is accompanied by a deep engagement on St. John’s part with the Ashcan school and legacies of Pop art. Working from this standpoint, his American portraits frequently center on those surviving on the slimmest of margins and wrung for the vastest of profits. His choice of materials always carries with it questions of class, value, and waste, subject matter filtered through the dross of mass culture; yellow press and bargain bin ephemera built for quick turnover and routine consumption. Rather than resulting from repeated acts of appropriation, St. John’s work can be understood as directly coextensive with infinite streams of publicity and media. This process reflects a broader cultural change, a mediatization of reality wherein, as Niklas Luhmann describes it, “the observation of events throughout society now occurs almost at the same time as the events themselves”.

Michael St. John has shown his work extensively over the past thirty years in museums, alternative spaces and galleries throughout the United States. Although he’s known primarily for his four exhibitions at the Andrea Rosen Gallery, other notable shows include those at team (gallery, inc.), Karma, NY, Marlborough Contemporary, Edward Cella in LA, CCS Bard, The Rubell Family Collection, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Andrew Kreps and Feature Inc.. This is the artist’s first show with de boer gallery and Pio Pico gallery.

de boer and Pio Pico are both located at 3311 E. Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, sharing a courtyard. The gallery’s remain temporarily open by appointment only. For further images and information, please visit deboergallery.com or piopico.us.

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