John Moran

Lives and works in Gent, Belgium

Artist statement

In our current social-media driven society, we constantly reinvent ourselves, creating content that illustrates who we are. This content may be based in reality but it is not a depiction of reality, though sometimes that line becomes blurred. Our failures are hidden from our feeds, but they are what shapes us. They are what makes us grow into the version of ourselves that we show to the world. My work toes this line between perception and reality. It feeds off of the uncertainty, this place between the known and the unknown, failure and success, life and death, fantasy and reality. As a storyteller, my work is constructed from a series of anecdotes, references, and experiences, constantly being reshaped and reformed. I draw ties to pop culture, politics, and social issues, while attempting to illustrate how I see the barrage of consumerism, religion, and politics colliding with depictions of social injustice, secular beliefs, and popular culture. I also realize that I am a product of all of these things. It is not an attempt at subversion, rather at reconciliation, and in a way a celebration of the absurdity and hypocrisy of our individual and social realities, and more importantly their cyclical and repetitive nature. I work with a variety of materials, but most frequently with glass. As a hot glass artist utilizing mixed media elements, my aesthetic approach and material use is unique in contemporary art. I believe it is important to combine conceptual and critical...

Artwork