Off Paradise

Presentation Details
Off Paradise will debut new works in an intergenerational duo presentation by Michael St. John and Mitchell Charbonneau. A rigorous chronicler of contemporary American culture, St. John explores notions of violence, desire, racism, and consumerism through strategies of appropriation and assemblage. His works glean their iconography without hierarchy from a wide range of source materials, mixing found images from advertising, cinema, and the news with passages of trompe l’oeil painting. Charbonneau’s sculptural interventions similarly deconstruct and recast everyday commercial objects, from folding chairs to air fresheners, with material exactitude and visual wit.

About the Gallery
Off Paradise is a gallery located on Walker Street founded by Natacha Polaert in the fall of 2019. The name evokes the old neighborhood of Five Points, at the center of which was a small, triangular park, full of hopes and grime, called Paradise Square. It also invokes Paradise Alley, the artists’ and poets’ colony on the then-godforsaken corner of Avenue A and East 11th Street that is referenced in Jack Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans. Off Paradise is a fictional place, right off Paradise, adjacent to it, but not exactly it.