Jon Gott: Foreign Correspondent

Sibyl Gallery presents Foreign Correspondent, a solo exhibition of work by Jon Gott.

Picture an island: 

What lives there? 

What is the climate? 

What is its industry? 

What are its resources? 

In Foreign Correspondent, Gott continues his interrogation into the nature and lives of objects. Through interconnected narratives of exchange and collaboration, Gott destabilizes the method and methodology of art making. Working largely in sculptural assemblage composed of found objects and ephemera, Gott casts aside all hierarchies among material, calling the value systems that enforce such hierarchies into question. 

Gott begins this exercise with a theoretical island and all of its connotations. An imagined island looks different to each individual, though cultural consensus dictates that there will be many associations in common. Gott approaches the indeterminacy of abstract thought with curiosity, welcoming both the commonalities and distinctions across individuals. He incorporates materials affiliated with tropical tourism, objects that distill the essence of a place down to its most commercially viable elements. These objects exist in response to the shared collective consciousness, an entire place reduced to that which is simplest to transport or exchange with an ultimate goal of connection. Gott digs into the nature of such connection, and how it is potentially influenced or corrupted by deep rooted structures of capitalism. 

In conjunction with the exhibition, the gallery and the artist have also collaborated with designer and bookmaker Erik Kiesewetter and curator Gabrielle Banzhaf on Sehnsucht, an experimental exhibition publication in a rare limited edition of 50. Designed to recall an obscure atlas or field guide, the book features Gott’s notes and poetry in conversation with made and found imagery. The sale of each book represents an invitation for viewers to remain connected through the physical souvenir after the end of Gott’s temporary installation.

The gallery and the artist would like to thank Andrew Gott, Elliot Banzhaf, Rachel Eckenrode, Robin Tanner, and Alex Steven Martin for their contributions to the exhibition.

ABOUT JON GOTT

Jon Gott is an artist, curator, teacher, builder, homemaker and dog lover born in Washington D.C. in 1984 and raised in a homeschooling family in the Great Lakes regions of Ohio. As a teenager, emancipated from his family, he adopted a nomadic lifestyle traveling widely across the globe before studying painting and sculpture in America. Since then he's lived and worked in Cleveland, New York, Chicago, Miami, and New Orleans. He produces sculpture, installation, drawing, performance, video, sound, and photography with a sprawling and playful sense of experimentation and influences as widespread as new age theology, Rock and Roll, and Japanese design.