The Art of Remembering

When you were a child, it was easy to imagine a world where cowboys sailed the stars in search of adventure and toys came alive while you slept; but you grow older and forget what it was like when the world was equal parts overwhelming and delightful, when life was a brand-new picture storybook you lived every morning. Jon Cournoyer has somehow remembered it all – the wonder, the flights of fancy, the things that go bump in the night – and rendered the ineffable emotions of that experience into his collaged screen prints. His pieces are layered with pages of old books, postcards, scraps of another time; these elements peer around one another, overlapping and supporting each other. Like the same story re-written many times in different languages, Cournoyer’s palimpsest images relate the mythical Golden Age of childhood in a manner that is intuited, not read; Summer vacation and Christmas are equidistant, the twilight lasts forever and if there is a creature lurking in the shadows, you’ll outsmart it somehow. That possibility, that the direction of the adventure will be dictated by your imagination, is ever-present in Cournoyer’s work. The End, Middle and Beginning, an exhibition of Jon Cournoyer’s recent work, opens with a free public reception from 6 to 10 p.m. on Friday, October 5, at Hoffman LaChance Contemporary (3100 Sutton Boulevard, Maplewood; 314-960-5322 or www.hoffmanlachancefineart.com). The show remains up through Saturday, November 3, and the gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday.
Wednesdays-Saturdays. Starts: Oct. 5. Continues through Nov. 3, 2007