Michael St. John, "Country Life"

Over the past several years, St. John has managed, with some success, to evoke America's propensity for racism, violence, grandiosity, self-delusion and general cheesiness through relatively simple collage-on-canvas compositions, using personal and pop-cultural detritus as elements. He continues to do so in these latest works, which hearken back to American 19th-century trompe l’oeil painting.