John De Fazio

John de Fazio (b. 1959, Reading PA) lives and works in San Francisco, CA. de Fazio’s works combine delicate ceramic techniques with kitschy Americana and psychedelic pop-cultural references. The works in Beasties are some of his largest slip cast sculptures, composed of pieces from multiple molds that are deftly seamed together and painstakingly glazed – queering and critiquing high-end ceramic production while also speaking to the pitfalls and hubris of human scientific experimentation.

John de Fazio received his BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art and his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Recent exhibitions include pt. 2 Gallery, Oakland CA (2023); Eric Firestone Gallery, New York NY (2022); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus OH (2022); The Pit, Los Angeles CA (2020); Venus Over Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA (2016).

Alongside his fine art practice, de Fazio has produced iconic work within the commercial realm creating sets and mutant toys for the first season of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, art furniture, murals and props while working for MTV in the 1990’s.

De Fazio’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, New York NY; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston TX; Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan WI; Wexner Art Center, Columbus OH; and the Shigaraki Museum, Shigeraki, Japan; amongst others.

Voyage LA Interview: “[...] These days I mostly work in mixed-media using materials like photographs, paraffin wax, plaster, glass, steel and found metal objects mixed with non-traditional materials such as medical imagery, grunge remnants like rust, hair, dust, and decayed organic substances. I am very interested in deterioration and glitch; recently I’ve been experimenting with photographic enlargements layered with various materials such as oil-soaked tissue, water-based paint, and fiberglass resin. As far as my film work goes, I use a lot of spoken word and stream of consciousness storytelling. You can see some examples of that on my website.

It’s always been difficult for me to put into words the message of my work and why I do it. Consistent threads have been the inter-connectivity of love, loss, lust, and other tragedies of the human condition, such as the cycle of decay and rebirth of consciousness. My artwork has become more of a record of my life, kind of like scars, as a catalog of the times that I’ve been through and what I was going through at the time In my life.

I also make furniture in my spare time that’s been described as a mix of post-apocalyptic, cyber-punk, and dystopian. My furniture explores themes of distress, decay, disintegration, and collapse through the use of junkyard objects, utilitarian materials such as chemically-aged copper and steel, using rudimentary, makeshift construction methods.

As far as influences go, my pool of inspirations is massive and constantly in flux in terms of discipline. Lately, I’ve been influenced by the Brutalist architecture movement of the ’70s, the cityscapes of painter Jeremy Mann, and the concrete sculptures of sculptor David Umemoto, just to name a few.”

COLLECTIONS

Public

Whitney Museum, New York, NY

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX

Banff Art Center, Banff, Alberta Canada

The DeYoung Museum, San Francisco, CA

MTV Networks, New York, NY

The Ceramic Research Center at ASU Art Museum, Tempe, AZ The Clay Studio, Philadelphia PA

The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ

Honolulu Art Museum, Honolulu, HI

Shigeraki Museum, Shigeraki, Japan

Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI

Wexner Art Center, Columbus, OH

University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA

American Craft Museum, New York, NY

Private

Anne MacDonald, Sebastopol, CA Sandy Besser, Santa Fe, NM

Billy Shire, Los Angeles, CA Richard Shaw, Berkeley, CA

Art Spiegelman, New York, NY Gary Panter, New York, NY Jim Hobberman, New York, NY Judith Schwartz, New York, NY

Anne Walsh, Berkeley, CA

Arthur Williams, New York, NY

Garth Clark, Santa Fe, NM

Peter Norton, New York, NY

Gail Elston, New York, NY

Mayer Russ, New York, NY

Tom Levine, New York, NY

Charles Le Dray, New York, NY

Carlos Gutierrez-Solano, New York, NY Andre de Shields, New York, NY

Cindy Sherman, New York, NY Henry Urbach, San Francisco, CA