The Vanishing American (1994), Oil & Acrylic/Canvas, 130x150cm
Center
for Visual Arts, "The Light is Diverse in California." Enrique Chagoya - Juror.
Oakland, CA.
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 psychi(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.
-- Harry Roche, SF Bay Guardian