January 6 – February 5, 2011
Opening reception:
Thursday, January 6, 2011
6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
ClampArt is pleased to announce “A Ghost is Occupying My Heart,” an exhibition of photographs by John Arsenault, the artist’s third show at the gallery.
In April 2008, after eleven years of living in New York City, John Arsenault packed up his bags and moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts for a year of self-discovery and artistic growth. With the end of a nine-year romantic relationship (which largely served as the subject of many of Arsenault’s earlier images), he sought out the artist colony of Provincetown as a place to heal and intensely concentrate on his photography.
While many of the works in the new exhibition are self portraits (as in his show from 2007), Arsenault is now incorporating evocative and emotional landscapes and still life imagery, punctuating the vision of his life with views outward, no longer presenting the viewer exclusively with photographs just of himself.
The artist writes: “Inspired by a desire to heal a broken heart and to find myself, I decided to strip myself down emotionally, often literally nude, in order to create a body of work that revealed my search and my pain as honestly as I could.”
Raised in a small town in northern Massachusetts, John Arsenault moved to New York City in 1997 to pursue a degree in photography at the School of Visual Arts. He now resides in Los Angeles. Arsenault’s photographs are represented in the permanent collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Ten-percent of the proceeds from the exhibition are being donated to The Trevor Project, the leading national organization focused on crisis and suicide prevention efforts among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) youth.