June 20 – 24, 2018
Flexspace A, CICA Museum
Monzen
Statement
The ideas that give rise to my art can be quite diffuse. Classical Myth, Buddhist philosophy, landscape, and visions of the afterlife intersect freely with interests in technology, music, history, language, and geometry. The allure of the unattainable and its connection to the passage of time have become central to my work, encouraging the inclusion of sound and motion as compositional elements. The temporal logic of this kinetic work mimics the viewer’s own existence, broaching questions of reality and illusion, the corporeal and the spiritual.
Monzen is a multi-channel audio-video installation centered around animated pinhole images shot in the bamboo forests of Japan paired with an ambient sound composition scored to the animation. Both sound and image are meant to evoke the wind, becoming a meditation on the many invisible forces at play in our lives.
John Douglas Powers
John Douglas Powers was born in Frankfort, Indiana in 1978. His sculptural work has been exhibited nationally at venues including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The MIT Museum, The Mariana Kistler Beach Museum of Art, The Huntsville Museum of Art, The Mason-Scharfenstein Museum of Art, The Wiregrass Museum of Art, The Alexander Brest Museum, The Masur Museum, The Gadsden Museum of Art, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, Brenda Taylor Gallery, The Georgia Museum of Art, The Vero Beach Museum of Art and Cue Art Foundation. His videos and animations have been screened internationally.
Powers studied art history at Vanderbilt University and earned his MFA in sculpture, with distinction, at the University of Georgia. His work has been featured in The New York Times, World Sculpture News, Sculpture Magazine, Art Forum, The Huffington Post, Art in America, The Boston Globe and on CBS News Sunday Morning. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Virginia A Groot Foundation Award, a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant as well as a Southeastern College Art Conference Individual Artist Fellowship, an Alabama State Council on the Arts Fellowship, and the Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award. Powers currently lives and works in Knoxville, Tennessee and teaches at the University of Tennessee.
John Douglas Powers “Monzen” (2017-18)