The exhibition invites viewers into the artist’s ongoing journey through trauma, shame and search for renewal. Through an obsessive layering process, Gann’s mixed media works reveal a personal mythology of battling inner forces and alternate timelines. At once violent and vulnerable, aching and exuberant, the works exist as diaristic residue that shows how humor can sit alongside pain, and that even as darkness persists, there are openings for growth and revelation.

 

In response to Gann's work, which speaks deeply to issues of trauma, identity, and mental illness, we are partnering with local organizations to provide mental health resources and promote dialogue around these important issues. By opening up a conversation, the artist and Scalehouse seek to combat shame and isolation, normalize help-seeking, and celebrate creative expression as a tool for healing.

 

About Jon Gann

Jon Gann is an artist from Alabama, currently living in Palm Springs, California. His practice has evolved from compulsion and a means of survival, to something therapeutic, to communication and connection. Automatic and provisional, his process-based drawings and paintings shift between states of bodily representation, gestural abstraction and material accumulation. Through this shifting, Gann engages in open-ended questioning of memory, identity and repair. “Memory is tricky. I want to point my practice to my future self. I am making to ask questions, to figure out who I am and how I fit, what to mend and what to let go.”