Reviews and art comments -- Harry F. Roche, SF Bay Guardian
Review of an exhibit at Singing-in-the-Stone, San Francisco
Berkeley gadfly John Sheridan's "Gravity" paintings
put a postmodern spin on art history and pop culture using recycled images
from the freewheeling '50s as their point of departure. Even as the confrontational
tondo, Circus Queen Descending, quotes everything from Botticelli's
Birth of Venus to Manet's Olympia, Sheridan lifts his leggy
models and titillating titles (Jail Bait, Juvenile Jungle, Easy to Pickup,
Girls in Prison) from pulpy paperbacks, campy comics, and teenage trash-film
promo posters of the period. Like Peggy Sue, Sheridan's harem of bodacious
bitchin' babes in tight skirts and sensible shoes are caught in that "We
Like Ike" timewarp when sex was a four-letter word and good girls didn't.
Like seismic sediment mirroring the pent-up passions rumbling beneath pre-Peyton
Place America, kaleidosocpic waves of liquid acrylic rock and roll across
Sheridan's canvases and swirl around his statuesque figures like psychedelic
sandstorms. Though these stormy and steamy gravity paintings routinely elicit
shrieks accusing them of sexploitation, they remain uplifting.
Excerpt of a Review of an exhibit at E'Space, San Francisco
…Political-correctness prisoner John Sheridan continues to mine
'50s camp for obscure visual nuggets; recent "gravity" paintings
like Doctor X (marks the spot!) should elicit the usual shrieks charging
sexploitation….
Review of UNTRUE BELIEVER at the French Hotel
Berkeley, CA
Works on canvas and drawings by John Sheridan
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 psych(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.
Excerpt of A Review of the exhibit ACME CUSTOM, San Francisco,
CA
Berkeley painter John Sheridan's canvases Heaven's My Destination
and Edsel are colorfully set adrift in the Freality Zone, a murky realm
where fantasy and reality coalesce. Sheridan's hallucinatory '58 Edsel is
a particularly artful acid trip: the hyperrealistically rendered vehicle-cum-symbol
- the stuff American dreams are made of - floats in a psychedelic red, white
and yellow nebula.
Foreword for 20-year Retrospective of
work of John Sheridan by Harry Roche
John Sheridan's 20-year back-to-the future retrospective of
painting, sculpture, and performance powerfully conveys just what a weird,
warped, tumultuous, and mythic place America is: a schizoid culture perennially
at
war with itself (not to mention the world at large). From early performances
(e.g. the 'Hitler Toss' at Fisherman's Wharf) to the iconic canvases of the
'90s (*Doctor X*; *The Night of Darwin*) gravity's unpredicatable pull continues
to play a pivotal role. As the artist cultivates a compelling Jackson Pollock-meets-Captain
Marvel aesthetic, he floats hyperealistic figures (resurrected from moldy
undervalued secondary sources--B-movie posters, pulp novel covers, etc.) atop
ebb-tiding abstract nebulae.
In an art-negative society that pillories art--and artists--
as either frivolous or dangerous, perhaps it's not surprising that Sheridan's
paintings have periodically elicited myopic shrieks of 'sexploitation' (populated,
as they are, with a sex-positive cast of bodacious femmes, as well chisled
beefcakes like 'George Brush' and 'Captain Triumph') and have felt the sting
of the censors lash.
If most explicit in recent barbed sculpture incorporating Barbie
and G.I. Joe, political undertows ---revolving around race, sex, class, and
gender-- continue to churn uneasily beneath the controlled chaos of the canvases'
whorling backgrounds. And like the pregnant conundrums of his 19th-century
artist hero, Edouard Manet, Sheridan's images revel in their own ambiguity.
As the millenium grinds to a halt, Sheridan has created a distinctive body
of pop-surrealist Americana.
Copyright © 2005 Harry Roche