john isiah walton

JOHN ISIAH WALTON

New Orleans, LA

New Orleans artist John Isiah Walton is informed by his city. His try-to-catch-everything aesthetic is based on the realities of living in a dynamic and messy city. This visual language is also informed by the everything-ness of pop culture and the internet, leading to work that is loaded with manipulated symbolism in its exploration of identity.

Walton uses humor and irreverent criticism to talk about the realities of contemporary life. Race, economics, politics, and cultural practice, as it relates to Blackness, are the root of many of his questions. As a painter, he connects to 19th Century French Realism which used figurative painting to challenge the impacts of industrialization on class and the realities of the poor. As he puts it, instead of doing paintings “of a carriage, plants, or people playing instruments. I needed to catch people robbing restaurants or a building burning down. I had to depict the real going on because it can always be swept away."

And We Went includes paintings that question systems that define or disrupt. The Trojan Horse, akin to contemporary malware which disguises itself as legitimate to cause disruption, mirrors varying dynamics of allyship and resources affecting communities around the country. The reduction of famous athletes to binary zeros and ones reflects the simplification and definition of people based on a prescribed language, not inherent to humanity.

Works on view