press release
HEARTS AND STEMS
JOHN MONTI
February 8th - March 10th, 2019
Opening Reception: Friday, February 8th 7-9 PM
Studio10 is pleased to present Hearts and Stems, a solo show of sculpture by John Monti. In this exhibition Monti brings the entire gallery space into play with a profuse installation of wall-mounted sculptures of hearts and flowers.
“Hearts and Stems is a new body of work that –installed as it is over Valentines Day– pokes around the edges of love, and its representation. By rifling through the conventions and promises we deploy as we represent affect, Monti delivers an installation that engages the glamor and poverty of our inner and inter personal experience.
The melodramatic flourishes, the ornaments and the deliberately deployed sculptural tchotchke do not simply conceal the collapse of language that occurs in talking of love. There is something more of an evolving journey through the borderlands of sculptural rhetoric –and the mist and haze of emotion– in search of representational utility.”
Born in Portland, Oregon, John Monti received a BS from Portland State University in painting, and an MFA in sculpture from Pratt Institute. Monti has exhibited internationally in museums and galleries and has completed public commissions and set-designs for dance.
Monti's work is included in major private and public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, The Eli Broad Family Foundation, The Portland Art Museum and the Wakita Museum of Art, Japan. Grants include the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Pollock Krasner Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. His work has been featured in many publications, including Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, Arts Magazine, Artnews, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. Monti lives in Brooklyn, NY and is Professor of Graduate Fine Arts at Pratt Institute.