John Orth
Faints and Slow Drifts
May 13th-June 12th

Cinders is proud to present John Orth in our gallery this month. He comes to us by way of Gainesville, Florida and brings with him a recent group of drawings. His drawing style evokes a feeling of old printmaking processes, faded like an old treasure map but with a deliberate hand. Sad and majestic ghosts dream with their heads in the clouds and morph into snow-peaked mountain tops while other ghosts are impaled by searing beams of light with a striking precision, that has perhaps more tenderness in its incision than hate. John says of his recent work: There is a Vic Chestnutt song in which he sings, "Hallelujah for the ghosties and all the scary monsters underneath the boiling seas". I always loved that line and wrote a song of my own that expanded the lives of those ghosties and found them "winding around frozen peaks, biting soggy lips (for fear the quiver set off a slip), dragging their tails in the fake snow and trailing off over the phone." As I was writing this song, I began to draw these characters in the margins of my notebooks. Pen and ink drawings became a large-scale window installation in Albany, NY later that year. I stood in the cold at the opening and realized they didn't belong there, all track lit and public-faced. Sometime later, I was asked to contribute to a show in L.A at the New Image Gallery. I had just bought two thrift-store frames earlier in the day. I slipped the cardboard from the frame (you could still see the haloed mark where a photo had been taped inside. I took out a dollar store mechanical pencil and began to realize these characters again. Over the next three months they kept coming...customized to fit their thrifted frames and drawn on the backs of photographs, nautical prints, and pitted cardboard. They finally made sense: faintly, slow drifting and barely there. See pics from the Opening