PARADE
Created by John Sanborn
Words and Music by Amanda Moody
October 21 – November 28, 2021
61 Shattuck Square (Kala Bagai Way), Berkeley, CA
Parade was commissioned by the City of Berkeley's Civic Arts Program with one a Berkeley Art Works Projects (BAWP) grant. Parade features a collection of faces and voices (29 performers, some expert singers, most not) - that create a statement of compassion - all singing a Capella a soulful song written by Berkeley composer Amanda Moody; testifying to our hope, faith and the power of joy.
ALL ROADS LEAD@836M
Agnès Guillaume | John Sanborn
January 21 – September 30, 2021
836M 836 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, CA
The four-month exhibit is the gallery’s first ever exhibit of Video Art and features a pair of works each from Guillaume (Paris & Brussels) and Sanborn (Berkeley) that reveal their ephemeral ideas made manifest into electronic reality; the classically trained musicianship of Guillaume (the minimalist) allowing her to use a single thought to conjure multiple moods, while Sanborn (the maximalist) preferring a pop culture lexicon that seeks to mash, mangle and transpose; the pair take on subjects ranging from the “comedy of death” and “incessant flow of life,” to how our minds cope with change and the unspoken bonds that go along with friendship.
All Roads Lead opened January 21 and runs through May 28 2021; private showings can be made by appointment
THE FRIEND
created by
John Sanborn
Festival Videoformes
March 18 - April 4, 2021
in the the Chapelle de l’Ancien Hôpital Général, Clermont-Ferrand, France
We spend our lives searching for ideas, structures and people to invest our faith in, because we think they will provide us with answers to questions we KNOW cannot be answered.
This 17 channel installation work presents the leader of a new religion called "New Thought" - a mysterious and charismatic figure, who calls themselves The Friend, delivering 7 sermons filled with instruction, divination, personal confession and a sticky mess of ambiguity.
The Friend is accompanied by 8 Saints of dubious distinction, and animations of their relics, who testify to this new religion and celebrate the freedom to build a utopia, albeit consisting of damaged souls.
The Friend is performed by John Cameron Mitchell.
November 2 - December 14, 2019
Telematic
323 10th Street, San Francisco CA
John Sanborn is fascinated by stories. – and the stories of those stories. The ways they inform our understanding of our selves, others, and the world. The ways they can be stifling and prejudicial. And the ways they so often prove to be fanciful illusions in which we have invested too much authority. But Sanborn’s work is not by nature cynical. He doesn’t bemoan this duplicity in the stories we tell. To the contrary, he celebrates the subversion of inherited narratives; and he affirms the deception in stories – albeit with a degree of dark humor – as holding open the possibility of their being told otherwise.
-curator Clark Buckner
5 September - 21 September
Galerie Tokonoma, Paris
Even as I type these words I know that I will fail to fully describe my ideas.
And that is the point.
Starting with the premise that empathy is programmatic, Post-Cards from Post-America tempers mixed signals and the imprecision and impracticality of morphology to create a narrative of confusion. Mashing together the ontology of phonological and expressive needs, the work extrudes our current lack of coherence into a comic linguistic puzzle.
The barriers to expression are the first step – but after that what do we have to say? Are we speaking truth to power, or shouting into the wind? Do we even know what truth is – or are we satisfied with making it up as we go along?
created by John Sanborn
Commissioned by
The National Museum of Qatar
Opened March 27, 2019
Permanent Installation
Alchemy celebrates the remarkable daring and enormous benefits of Qatar’s development of Liquid Natural Gas as a resource for the world. The work conveys the beauty and majesty of this achievement, in ingenious and poetic form; beginning with a mysterious unknown, continuing through three choreographic stages, and ending with a smile of recognition.
Produced by the Doha Film Institute
Edited by John Sanborn, Heloise Roueau and Roger Jones
Technical Direction by Dean Winkler and Roger Jones
CGI by Nice Shoes, New York
(the straight line and a circle)
March 9th – March 25th 2017
Galerie de l'Angle
45 rue des Tournelles
75003 Paris
Science and art were once complimentary philosophies of existence – each with their particular definition of truth. One understands that facts will lead to conclusions; the other asserts the journey is more interesting than the destination.
To combat this, we grope for ways to describe our emotions, in order to weaponize them. Calculations affecting time and memory indicate that neural pathways are not direct, but circuitous and without logic.
Une Exposition des Oeuvres de
John Sanborn
Curated by Stephen Sarrazin
Musee des Arts Decoratifs
Palais Jacques Coeur
Bourges, France
11.24.16 to 12.22.16
A collection of eight installations curated by Stephen Sarrazin, and presented with Bandits Mages, Isabelle Carlier, Director.
Palais Jacques Coeur:
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The Temptation of St. Anthony
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If I Might Suggest
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Rock | Paper | Scissors
Musee des Arts Decoratifs_Hotel Lallemant
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Rhyme or Reason
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RED Book series
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Mythic Status
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Encryption
the Media Art of John Sanborn
Bangkok Art and Cutlure Center
03.25.16 to 07.10.16
Curated by my friend, writer and teacher, Stephen Sarrazin, this show is the biggest, richest and most intense exhibition I’ve ever done.
For this show I created two new works, showcased four recent installations, added to a series of new gods, and remade a classic installation work from 1982. The assembly of the works felt like one giant statement.
Dowsing for Divinity
a one-person show of media art works
Curated by Stephen Sarrazin
Cartel Collective
October 8 to 1. November 2015
Sanborn combines questions of biography and memory, how we remember (and the betrayals of memory), conflicts of identity and who we want to be, of doubt and triumph, all in a form that combine high tech virtuosity, considerations on the use of narrative in the art environment, and a playful sense of irreverence.
V+M | 2015
9 channel video and sound installation
Music by Theresa Wong
Co-Produced by Videoformes
March 2015
V+M examines the nature and value of Venus and Mars by retelling their story rendered in the language of love, delivered by portraits of three couples (male + female, female + female, male + male) whose attraction and love cross traditional boundaries. The work presents a cross-gender interpretation of the mythic pairing of Eros and Chaos to get to the root of what makes Mars, Mars; and Venus, Venus.
RHYME or REASON
3 channel video and sound installation
music by Theresa Wong
Rhyme or Reason is an expression of humanity as positioned somewhere between inarticulate intimacy and a vast social machine. The work is commentary on our inability (but continual struggle) to define ourselves - powerless against the forces of nature and the initiatives of civilization.
Rhyme or Reason premiered at the TRACE(S) festival des arts numeriques in the Chartreuse de Valbonne on May 5th 2015.