John Kaine

A Saint in Every Dream ....
(my most current show here in Oaxaca Mexico at La Rueda gallery)
Images seep through layers of dreams and memories; others explode like fireworks. Images emerge from the artist’s culturally hybrid world. Patterns from Mexican oilcloth coexist sublimely with Disney characters and visual poems that recall Jean Michel Basquiat and Manuel Ocampo. Homoerotic beauty and queer humor share space with loss and despair: agony without ecstasy, Donnie Darko’s fears, a twin brother gone too soon. Tom Waits’ lyrics inspire the title of the exhibition that is filled with Christ’s and saints. Catholic ( el Santo Niño de Atocha), Aztec (Quetzalcoatl), and secular: the miracle of Miguel de Cervante’s words in the dark decades of Spain’s bloody conquest of the Americas, Brad Davis embodying Genet’s Querelle in Fassbinder’s film, the handsome tattooed Mexican barber who cuts old men’s hair for free, Versace, martyred by homophobic violence, and the aging screen goddess who spent her last years as an advocate for those with AIDS. They bring news from distant stars in the artist’s sui genesis universe.

One man shows at La Jícara (Oaxaca 2012), the Steve Martin Studio (New Orleans, 2006, 2003, 2001), la Galería Gilberto Acevedo’s Navarro, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco (2001), the Dana Center Gallery, Loyola University (New Orleans, 2000), Casa Latina, UC Santa Cruz (1995). Group exhibitions at the Espacio Cultural Rancho Tecomate Cuatolco, Casa de Poeta (Tenango del Aire, Estado de México, 2017, 2013), the ChimMaya Gallery ( Los Angeles, 2013) the Sanchez Art Center (Pacifica, California 2012, 2014), San Francisco State University (2013, 2010), the Mexican Consulate San Francisco (2009), el Bienal de Estandartes (Tijuana, 2008), the Fulbright International Institute (San Francisco, 2008), the Alexandria Museum of Art (Alexandria, Louisiana, 2003), the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery (New Orleans, 2003), and the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art (Biloxi, Mississippi, 2002).