((L-R) OPHLII, artist: Jon Gann, media and dimensions: mixed media on illustration board; 30×20″; slip/caul, artist: Jon Gann, media and dimensions: mixed media on canvas; 24×24″; stilled life with tangerine, artist: Jon Gann, media and dimensions: mixed media on icanvas; 36×48″)
Scalehouse Gallery announces their new exhibition, Jon Gann: infinity splinters / resttagebücher. This exhibition will open Friday, November 5, and will be on view through Friday, December 31.
The exhibition invites viewers into the artist’s ongoing journey through trauma, shame and search for renewal. Through an obsessive layering process, Gann’s mixed media works reveal a personal mythology of battling inner forces and alternate timelines. At once violent and vulnerable, aching and exuberant, the works exist as diaristic residue that shows how humor can sit alongside pain, and that even as darkness persists, there are openings for growth and revelation.
“My past troubles me… and I am working to change my relationship to it,” said Gann. “I feel the difficulty in truly letting it go, but it needs to become something else…a more beautiful part of me, and much less angry, because I can’t grow otherwise.”
In response to Gann’s work, which speaks deeply to issues of trauma, identity, and mental illness, Scalehouse is partnering with local organizations to provide mental health resources and promote dialogue around these important issues. By opening up a conversation, the artist and Scalehouse seek to combat shame and isolation, normalize help-seeking, and celebrate creative expression as a tool for healing.
ABOUT JON GANN
Jon Gann is an artist from Alabama, currently living in Palm Springs, California. His practice has evolved from compulsion and a means of survival, to something therapeutic, to communication and connection. Automatic and provisional, his process-based drawings and paintings shift between states of bodily representation, gestural abstraction and material accumulation. Through this shifting, Gann engages in open-ended questioning of memory, identity and repair. “Memory is tricky. I want to point my practice to my future self. I am making to ask questions, to figure out who I am and how I fit, what to mend and what to let go.”
ABOUT SCALEHOUSE
Scalehouse is a multidisciplinary contemporary arts center convening diverse thinkers for in-depth discussions, artistic collaborations, exhibitions and events, including Bend Design Week and Scalehouse Gallery. Scalehouse believes our shared future presents complex challenges and opportunities, not just benefiting from creativity but requiring it. We are committed to programming that’s accessible, provocative, extraordinary and inclusive — always with an eye toward a better future. Learn more at scalehouse.org
Scalehouse is located in Franklin Crossing on the Tin Pan Alley Side. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 1pm-6pm and by appointment.