John’s work attempts to evoke familiarity through abstraction. John has been exhibited internationally and featured in various publications–including a four-page feature in Gestalten’s “Age of Collage: Contemporary Collage in Modern Art.”
Instead of rebellion, the artist John Whitlock leads with the reset, looking at existing works not with the catalyst of a wrench, but rather, as his own artistic provisions. “I often approach my work from a formalist point of view,” he says. “By breaking an image apart into pieces, you can build new, sort of fragmented narratives.” Indeed, what comes from this is entirely Whitlock’s own: lost, shape-like letters that form a sort of sculptural tongue through use of layers, space, and—perhaps more commonly—the lack thereof.
–Essential Homme Magazine, June/July 2016
This series was initiated as a prompt from the New Collection around the theme “Audacious America”. Much of the imagery comes from economic expansion era pop culture and post-civil war publications. The series as a whole is a play on the foundations of modern inequality as a result of both periods: the failed promises of confiscation/redistribution after the American Civil War, and the myth of the American dream during the golden age of capitalism. Funds raised will go to the Coalition for the Homeless.