Hoffman LaChance: Friday, 5 October 2007

The End, Middle and Beginning is a series of unique collages, screen printed,painted by Jon Cournoyer. The works incorporate photographs, postcards,and book cover pages collected in abandoned buildings, allies, flea markets in Europe, Mexico, and at small town swap meets across the United States.He is drawn to utopian projects from space flight to rock opera, and to the demons of nineteenth-century fairy tales. Fantasies and fears of childhood are recurring themes in his work, as is the patina acquired by things that are outmoded and discarded. The first stage of Jons work, he considers a process akin to automatic writing, in that he begins with found imagery to tap into unconscious associations. A collage is then developed exploring a theme. Separate drawings are made to begin directing a narrative. These drawings become screen prints which are in turn applied on top of the collage. For example, The Dream (2007) incorporates a cartoon owl, a photograph of a winter landscape, drawings of halucinagenic patterns, and a fragment from an early twentieth-century advertising which highlights the elements of play and chance in the work. Superimposed on the collage is the image of a man awakening from a dream.