Downtown, Los Angeles
Johann Mun
Letters
As It StandsAs It Stands is pleased to present Letters, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles based artist Johann Mun. The exhibition consists of eighteen paintings depicting photographs rendered in black paint on primed canvas and mounted in close proximity to one another. All images are inverted to negative and warped to fit a stretcher that is between two and five times the proportions of US letter size. The photographs reproduced are selected due to their potent position in our collective memory. Individually, they demonstrate a photograph's efficiency in depicting moments of tragedy, violence, triumph, pain, accomplishment, comedy, beauty, banality, technology, mythology, ideology and more. The volume of images all transposed through the same rigid formal filter flattens their contents. Subsumed by the montage, the sentiments behind each image momentarily vacate. There is a room of people talking over one another, exceptional pictures diluted within a torrent of exceptional pictures, scaled to fit a homogenizing medium. Johann Mun, (b. 1992), lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include Sprezzatura at As It Stands Los Angeles (2024), The Brood at Imperial Gallery Los Angeles (2023), 100 Belltowers, Montreal (2022), and Paraphrasing the New Ardent Centuries, Hans Gallery Chicago (2022). He received his BFA in Photography and Media from California Institute of the Arts in 2014.