From Basket Books & Art:

"Basket Books & Art, in collaboration with Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino and ​Corbett vs. Dempsey, is pleased to present John Sparagana’s Projectile, a body of work born of a book and originating in a single source image: a news photograph documenting a dyspeptic outburst in the wake of a canceled rock concert. The show will run through December 7, 2024 with an opening reception on Saturday, October 26 from 4-6pm.

The works that form Projectile were first exhibited in 2021 in Chicago at Soccer Club Club, the exhibition space offspring of the ever-vibrant Drag City record label. The project itself stems from a collaboration with the musician-poet David Grubbs, who cannily pointed Sparagana towards the inciting image. The collaboration was further extended in the form of an eponymously named small-format paperback book, designed by Reto Gieser and accompanied by a 2,100-word sentence authored by Grubbs. Projectile was published by Drag City in November 2021.

The hijacked media image central to the Projectile series depicts bodies and objects vibrating in unruly tension, a people-packed arena in which the crowd performs disappointment, a tantrum of tossed chairs and flailing limbs. This image, having been rerendered as an archival photographic print, serves as the raw material of the artwork to then be remixed by Sparagana. Sliced and repeated according to an analog formula that distends the image–Sparagana’s conspicuous approach to collage seeds vibratory disruption into an already belligerent tableau. This formal conceit generates a spectacular ocular effect, foisting a bellicose scene of unrest onto our bruised senses.

The title, Projectile, speaks to the hurled chair–the object–and to the force of movement through space, captured in Sparagana’s refracted treatment: a visual stutter whose echoes resonate through and beyond what the artist  has called the “inherent political content” of the source image. The potency of these images offers a timely opportunity to once again ponder the power of image-making in a beset landscape."