Forging connections
Exhibit statement
Featured Artists
William S Burroughs, Morgan Mandalay, Fabián Chairez, Matt Borruso, Gustavo Monroy, Kink Kooi, Mireille Delice, David Shaw, Domenico Zindato, Héctor Velázquez, John Monti, Ocean&Wind and John R. Thompson.
What makes John R. Thompson (Schenectady, New York, 1947) a very complete artist is not only his enigmatic and heterodox work or the teaching facet he developed for years at the prestigious Parsons School and at the Experimental Vershire school in Vermont.
Thompson is an artist who conceives creation from three other scenarios parallel to artistic production and has given him enormous creative freedom, quite unprecedented otherwise: to propose an exhibition space such as 108ag_ projects in Juárez neighborhood from México, that of a collector with an artist's look and last but not least, his facet as a curator.
It is really impossible to disconnect your work from these activities.
Thompson is, to paraphrase the title of this last exhibition, "Forging Connections" between his dense artistic work, the curatorship and his original collection of contemporary art.
In the manner of a cabinet of curiosities "Forging Connections" is established, as its title indicates, from a curatorial gesture that generates dialogues between works, organized as chapters of a book, which Thompson calls vignettes.
The title of the exhibition is not random: in reality the curatorship and the interpretation of works start precisely from creating connections and correspondences between pieces, texts and images, which expands new ways of seeing and understanding the works.
Forging connections runs on looking, desire and body. The elegant groups of works are instituted as small theaters related to these concepts and the relations of works (of the highest quality) expand their themes as a dance among several protagonists. They are synchronic speeches that do not attend to a specific chronology, style
or time.
Combining high culture and popular culture, books and works of modern masters with young creators and objects outside the world of art, such as a dry plant or a bottle with an indecipherable liquid, the result is a coherent and intelligent collage divided into nuclei of meaning. The incorporation of Thompson's particular work is the nodal point of this curatorial artistic experience and the best way to understand the dense and cryptic semantic universe of his wall reliefs or his works on paper.
Thompson moves this material and conceives it as a dense network of organic spaces and knots. They are a dense materiality that reminds the body as a place of fluids and tensions and at the same time they remember from their expansive abstraction, a natural universe, like mangroves or roots.
This exhibition undoubtedly expands the possibility of understanding his cryptic artistic work and also adds to the works of the selected artists an adjective that enriches their semantic and aesthetic senses.
Finally it should be said that the Forging Connections cartoons are instituted in the exhibition space of this “Wunderkammer” which is 108ag_ projects as installations made by an artist with his work and that of other colleagues.
And they are equally poetic constellations of great delicacy.
The hybrid gesture of looking curatorial and artistically the work itself and that of others, to generate in the privileged viewers another way of looking and generating connections.
Carlos Palacios
2019
© JOHN R. THOMPSON. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ALL THE ARTWORKS AND CURATOR'S STATEMENTS ARE PROPERTY OF THEIR AUTHORS.