“In the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work.”
—Martin Heidegger
STUDIO: 1070 East Front Street #D, Ventura, CA 93001
solo exhibitions:
2023, The Meaning of Life: Self Portrait, 643 Project Space, Ventura, CA
2018, Queer Before Queer, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Prince Street Gallery, New York, NY
2017, Jane Doesn’t Need Dick: Origin of Love, Touchstone Gallery, Washington, DC
group exhibitions:
2021, Reflection, Launch LA & Korean Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA
2021, Out There, LAAA, Gallery 825, Los Angeles, CA
2021, An A-Historical Daydream, 14th Biennial, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
2021, Darkness/Light, LGBTQ Center’s Advocate & Gochis Galleries, Los Angeles, CA
2020, Crisis Mode, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, CA
2020, The Next Big Thing, Studio Channel Islands Art Center, Camarillo, CA
2020, Tarfest 2020: Transition, Launch, Los Angeles, CA
2017, 4th Annual Juried Show, Emulsion Gallery, Washington, DC
2016, Transformer Silent Auction, American University Museum, Washington, DC
2016, Defy/Define, Transformer Gallery, Washington, DC
2015, Locally Sourced, American University Museum, Washington, DC
2014, Collage + Assemblage, (Scene) Metrospace, East Lansing, Michigan
fellowship:
2015, Touchstone Gallery
Jo Ann Block is a queer artist who currently lives and works in the Los Angeles area. Her art investigates queer history and identity within historical and contemporary culture. She works across various mediums including collage, installation, painting, and digital art.
tree stump, tree limbs, silver foil tape, plastic goats, detritus h 112” x w 66” x d 57”
NAKED
wall-hanging monitor, TV table, retro movie projector h 22” x w 16’” x d 24”
KARIN chairs, floor lamp, metallic wire hands, plywood, shag fabric, silver foil tape, acrylic paint, oil painting h 59” x w 29’”x d 84”
TODAY IS Tree stump, 14,600 computer printouts, metal, glitter, light bulbs, Tonka trucks, video projector h 109” x w 13” x d 11”
THROWN-NESS
rocks, beer cans, beer crate, chicken wire, slogan buttons, bongs, linoleum, twigs, plywood, house paint h 41” x w 50”x L 75”
Jo Ann Block culls from a prolific array of found and collected materials for her mixed media collages and assemblage sculptures—from digital ephemera to fantasy comics, crushed beer cans to office desk calendars, boys’ toys to counterculture merchandise, raw soil to industrial equipment, chopped wood to cheeky home movies and the furniture of domesticity. In Block’s studio, these and other whimsical, poignant elements are both transformed and preserved; their primary purpose is not as raw material, though her work is often large-scale and evocatively tactile. Rather, each chosen element carries a deliberate, intentional symbolism, emblematic of the specific story she is profoundly engaged in telling and understanding—her own.
Perennially recombinant and thoughtfully narrative and language based, Block’s works and series are message-infused, whether that be rescuing unknown episodes from—or critiquing the official version of—queer history, or a more private perspective. She likes to build images and objects out of things from around, elements which not only depict and relate but directly embody their role in the story. With airs of Rauschenberg’s Combines but nowhere near as random, the juxtaposed objects speak a story of resonance rather than surrealism, confluence rather than cognitive dissonance; despite what may at first seem strange or a bit dreamlike, every single element in Block’s work has a job to do that moves the story, a symbol to proclaim that informs its meaning.
Across Block’s installation The Meaning of Life, the artist leads the viewer on a walkthrough journey from her own biography, albeit one that frequently doubles as a story of society. From her early search for identity, through hard times of misspent energies, to a triumph of self-improvement and philosophy, the attainment of true friendship, true love, community, clarity, confidence, creativity— and ultimately the arrival at her own authentic self. In her case, this path has wound through periods of rebellion and reflection including on her queer sexuality and an encroaching confrontation with aging. Actively engaged in the intersection of shrouded histories and lived experience, with this installation, Block arrives not only at a meandering, marvelous shape for her life, but a fuller understanding of its meaning—a philosophical stance that plays out in her material and object choices.
For example in the primordial, Rube Goldberg-esque Just Add Water, a mound of clay-like earth waits to be shaped. High atop a scaffold structure a wide funnel gathers water that will be collected and directed below to help give the clay form. It’s an open-ended monument to raw potential and a straightforward metaphor for taking charge of your own destiny as well as a signal of openness to circumstance; it would also function on a literal level—and it’s this dynamic metonymy that lends Block’s work its eccentric existentialist flavor.
Thrown-ness references ideas from Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, having to do with the degree to which the circumstances (into which one is thrown at birth) determine destiny. Only the deliberate choice to interrogate and interrupt the acceptance of conformity can hope to free anyone to become their authentic selves. A cascade of crushed Budweiser beer cans recalls both Felix Gonzalez-Torres and toxic Americana; in the tableau they represent Block’s mistakes with alcohol and other excessive self-medication. A hamster wheel festooned with her collection of counterculture buttons and pins represents a time of searching—but are also literal artifacts of that time in U.S. history and in her own life.
Artists like Kim Abeles and Tracey Emin have used both furniture and intimate archives to generate socially engaged, personally revelatory sculptural moments—Abeles in the service of public issues awareness, and Emin in pursuit of personal liberty and radical honesty. The same dynamics of message, meaning and material play out in subsequent works like Today Is—a totemic tower of calendar pages representing and literally embodying the one day at a time of 40-plus sober years, perched atop a wooden stump whose rings count the tree’s age the same way. In Gods & Goats—an ode to Nature in the form of a tree built of salvaged branches, home to capricious creatures, is a surrogate life form built from elements discovered on her therapeutic nature walks.
As her sense of self becomes ever more assertive and authentic, Block’s work increasingly addresses queer experience with more specificity. The home movies documenting idyllic afternoons spent in community, and in the pool, for Naked Lesbian Volleyball also depict many of that circle of friends who were immortalized in the related Queer Before Queer near life-sized collaged portraits of older butch nudes. The sparse but powerfully emotional vignette Karin celebrates 25 years of romance and partnership, signified by a pair of vintage chairs linked by tender wire hands, the warmth of a reading light, and a portrait of lesbian coupledom, uses furniture in a gentle arrangement evoking Ed & Nancy Kienholz in a rare sentimental mood.
By the time we arrive at death with This is the End—integrating the fact of time’s fleeting and human mortality, as Heidegger recommends, into a holistic conception of life—a sense of memoir, memory, and yes, meaning has been outlined for both the artist and the viewer through the specific qualities of Block’s materials and moments, telling a real and thus universal story.
—Shana Nys Dambrot Arts Editor, LA Weekly Los Angeles, 2024