Jonni Cheatwood: Live! From Therapy

29 May-3 Jul 2021

Overview

We have undergone a revolutionary period unprecedented in modern times. Political, social, economic upheaval, and even climate change. The role of the artist in such a period is to react, reflect, and record their experience and materialize this process for the reception of the greater public in both the present and the future. With regard to this new body of work by gallery artist Jonni Cheatwood, both the current Covid pandemic as well as the Black Lives Matter movement have contributed to forming the basis of his new body of work. “My motivation here is to explore expressions in the social struggle, the nature of reality,” Cheatwood says from his home in Los Angeles. “It’s basically self-retrospective.” The works are typical of Cheatwood’s growing oeuvre: self-reflexive, tongue-in-cheek, humorous, and light-hearted… but what we are also seeing for the first time is a poignant, relatable, and altogether human side of artist’s personal struggle as mixed-race black and Latino man in modern-day America: “[I wanted to discuss] being a BIPOC, being in an interracial marriage, my own anxieties and struggles.” The artist discusses that the works aren’t all necessary reactionary or revolutionary, but internalized, where meaning exists ‘beneath’ these figures.

Press

Jonni Cheatwood: Live! From Therapy press release
Download