You are invited to the opening of Appropriate Everything! a two-person exhibition by me and Darren Haper at Art Access Gallery in Columbus, Ohio.

The show runs from February 1st through April 1st 2021. The opening is Friday, February 19th, 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm.

Art Access Gallery 640 S. Drexel Avenue, Bexley, OH 43209

Appropriate Everything!
John Sousa & Darren Haper

There’s honor among even metaphorical thieves. But when T.S. Eliot wrote “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” he probably never anticipated the long, strange poem at the heart of the post-millennial Internet. Online, the immense panorama of contemporary history unfolds in greater anarchy than even Modern texts like The Wasteland or Ulysses. How could anyone reasonably predict the alarming number of people who enjoy seeing pictures of bread stapled to trees in the 21st century? Or that anyone with broadband access could locate photos of a clown-suited John Wayne Gacy in a matter of seconds?

The Internet is home to many strange sights, but the infrastructure’s democratizing influence is well documented. And in true democratic fashion, the material is up for grabs to anyone. The work in Appropriate Everything! takes the “great artists steal” adage and looks at it from several angles. Using a shared set of imagery “appropriated” from the Internet, each artist creates their own body of work by adopting materials and techniques from the other. Not only do the artist steal from the Internet, they also steal from each other. Rubber ducks, Saturday morning cartoons, and grinning emojis make appearances across the work. Globs of paint and floating text give the work a knocked-together magazine collage vibe. Despite covering common visual ground, the work lays bare the stylistic distance between both artists. In the democratic sharing of source material, medium, and technique, the work becomes more distinct, not less. In            releasing ownership of a particular style or aesthetic, the work becomes full of possibilities once again.

Morgan Laurens