GAYLETTER

Scooter LaForge‘s second solo exhibition at Munch Gallery centers on a cross country road trip undertaken with Johnny Rozsa in 2013. Bringing along 3 dogs and a copy of John Steinbeck‘s Travels with Charlie (a 1962 work on the famous authors adventures with his canine), LaForge sketched and painted his way across the US. Utilizing a landscape familiar to both writers and artists, the final result is less Steinbeck and more Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac, with chaotic imagery intermingling with dark subtext. “I started to draw and paint small details of beauty that caught my eye” LaForge writes, and these details certainly stand out.  Shining something like the light of a perverted abstract expressionism on the banality of the images seen on long highway trips, Travels with Johnny hints at the connections left behind on the road.

The opening reception for this show is on Thursday, January 29th, from 7:00-9:00PM. The exhibit is sure to be a colorful ride, with the artist forced to recount the grueling work he put in for the 15 pieces on display that took up the last year and a half of his life. All art is personal but with the trip including pit stops for portraits and visits with family in Utah and Arizona, the intimacy of the images should be self-evident. Moving between those connections founded on family and those found on the road, Travels with Johnny  processes and amalgamates the details of butterflies caught in spider webs in Pennsylvania and bullet holes spotted on abandoned buildings in Indiana, drawing on the ways we all connect, or don’t, with the world passing by around us.

Munch Gallery, 245 Broome St. NY, NY.