Yianni Johns
Out From Down Under & Beyond: Fine Art From Australia and New Zealand
May 11 - June 1, 2010
Reception:
Thursday May 13, 2010 6-8 PM
Press Release
Yianni Johns’ paintings confront us with a seemingly placid contemporary world which has been quietly infected with a powerfully surreal disconnect. His amiable subjects return the viewer’s gaze with stares reminiscent of the blank looks of the hypnotized. They stand before backgrounds of sunny vistas or chilly corporate spaces, holding before them prized abstract, impossible objects. We do not know how to read these people and their enigmatic totems. Should we fear them, pity them or laugh at them?
The audacity of these works lies in their poker-faced cheeriness. Yianni has subverted a multitude of our cultural assumptions, primarily the manufactured responses we have to our visual creations. Nothing comes together to create cohesion here, and Yianni exposes how reliant we are upon narrative in our representational art. We are left without familiar references in these works so powerfully about anxiety and the lack of familiarizing context. These works are chilling and powerful commentaries on our society and our psychologies.
Artist Statement
I paint, therefore I am. The need to paint is as important as my need for oxygen, my need for love, my need for life. My art is my way of saying, communicating the way my mind and my heart see the world. Often I use it to throw light on the shallowness of a consumerist world where fulfillment comes through possession of objects which quickly become obsolete. My art is not about preaching or lecturing, but about stopping my audience for a moment of reflection and perhaps realization. It is this that I want to spread to the world through my national and international exhibitions.
Invitation to the exhibition
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View the catalog page
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Artists in this exhibition
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