Andrea Schwartz Gallery

Andrea Schwartz Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition for John Randall Nelson. "Working in the relative isolation of Arizona for the last ten years, John Nelson has synthesized his illustrative and sculptural experience into a unique body of work that combines painting, drawing, and text with narrative content. Nelson embraces the concept of artist as storyteller, a chronicler of contemporary culture. His symbolic amalgamations, which often consist of a central image superimposed over a collage of symbols and text (anything from art criticism to nursery rhymes), make intuitive sense of the inundation that we experience in what Nelson sees as our "over-communicated, how-to world." Bits and pieces from daily life are placed, layered, painted, sanded and repainted; in this persistent, almost obsessive editing and rearrangement we find the grammar of Nelson's private language. And because the constant reworking of the surface and the rearranging of form describe the process of discovery and creation, the paintings end up being narrative in two ways: they ask us to invent our own stories based on the images and messages that Nelson uses, but they also present the "story" of their own creation and invite us to share the restless, somewhat anxious journey of the art-making process."
Excerpt by Deborah Sussman Susser.

John earned a MFA from the Herberger College of Fine Arts, Arizona State University in 1995. He has work in numerous public and corporate collections such as: Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, Arizona; Phoenix Children's Hospital, Phoenix, Arizona; The Perrier Corporation, Paris, France; Chemical Bank, New York, New York; and the Tempe Municipal Arts Commission, Tempe, Arizona. John has exhibited at The Bentley Projects, Tempe, Arizona; Gallery Materia, Scottsdale, Arizona; Marguerite Oestreicher, New Orleans, Louisiana; Vanier Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona; and Solomon Dubnick, Sacramento, California. This is John's second exhibition at Andrea Schwartz Gallery.