Reborn on a Tightrope (1987), Acryilc/Canvas, 42 X 60"
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Art, food and sex sometimes add up to a stick three-course disaster in
Berkeley. East Bay painter-provocateur John Sheridan ran afoul of the local
sex police when a woman thought she spied a large penis lurking within the
acrylic nebula of one of his abstract "gravity paintings" hanging
at Au Coquelet. Not only was the work in question removed, Sheridan's entire
show was taken down in deference to her hallucination. Fortunately the French
Hotel, a nearby café and site of Sheridan's Exhibition "Untrue
Believer," doesn't appear to cater to the same clientele. The 11 large-scale
canvases and smaller pastels on marbelized paper now on view are littered
with loners who have just emerged from psychi(edel)ic wormholes (The Cybernaut,
The Vanishing American, Dr. X, The Love Offering, Kanteen Kate) and a
working-class, pop-Americana past (resurrected mainly via 1950s pulp novels,
campy comics, and trash film-promo posters - Edouard Manet goes back to the
future). To achieve these poignant and pervasive four dimensions of separation,
Sheridan floats hyperrealistic figures on top of abstract Jackson Pollock-meets-Captain
Marvel backgrounds.
-- Harry Roche, SF Bay Guardian
(See references to "Reborn on a Tightrope" in Harry Roche's
interview. 1)