Born in New Jersey in 1966, John D. Monteith is a self-taught artist currently living in Columbia, South Carolina. Working for more than 30 years now, he has been shown in many solo and group shows. His pieces have also been included in numerous public and private collections as well as a host of publications and periodicals.
Although his current focus is painting, the last three decades of production have been experimental in nature, exploring a wide variety of media and techniques. Whether it is collages assembled from old, found school yearbooks, wash drawings of chatroom avatars done in tobacco juice, or an installation of 30 digital frames (each displaying a slide show of hundreds of early dial-up era webcam selfies) his work has always delved into questions of otherness and the idea of parallel or shadow states of existence.
A life-altering event in 2020 moved Monteith toward his recent body of flat, intimately scaled, and deliberately muted or blurry paintings. Gleaned from re-photographed film stills or images he has either found or taken himself, he sees his new pieces as meditations on a certain amorphous, apparitional characteristic that has not only become a major component of his own, new reality but also part of what he senses to be an underlying feature of living in the 21st century. Hinting at a constant, subtle entropy with elements of dark humor, absurdism, and melodrama and painted using a subdued palette, his new, small paintings can be seen as the looking glass that many of us may already be on the other side of.
Audio editing by Aubrey Vaughn.
In 1997 and 2001, Ricco/Maresca mounted two solo shows of the artist’s work. Like our gallery program, Monteith has never been easy to categorize. He has been lying dormant with us… waiting.
Through the emergence and dominance of the “giants,” we both remain true to our mission.
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All works:
Oil on gessoed Dura-lar Matte
$2,800 ea. Unless otherwise noted
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Studio walls with works in progress. -
Studio wall with works in progress.
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