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Rancho Santa Fe, CA – Oolong Gallery is proud to present “Sun Goin’ Down,” the first solo exhibition of 2025 UCSD MFA painter John Singletary, opening June 6 from 6-8pm at our Rancho Santa Fe location. This powerful body of work, four years in the making, introduces Singletary’s haunting, symbolic, and deeply personal paintings to the public for the first time.
Singletary’s painting practice delves into memory and myth. Drawing from Biblical and Classical tales, Southern folklore, his family’s spiritual lineage, and the subconscious, the artist channels a visual language steeped in longing, pain, and transformation. His work explores themes of death, love, and fear, and reanimates the sacred and the subconscious through ritualized technique and iconographic reference.
“My aim is to make paintings that create a separation from the self and its fears or desires, creating space for thinking.”
In “Sun Goin' Down,” Singletary’s technique and process becomes part of the meaning. Through methods such as sgraffito, sfumato, sanding, and scraping, the surface of each canvas evokes a kind of resurrection—a cycle of death and rebirth in oil and pigment.
“In moments where I render carefully, there is longing. In moments where I have sanded the canvas bare, a subconscious death has occurred.”
Singletary explores Christianity as both salvation and trauma, magic and evil. His paintings pulse with the ghost-like presence of those who came before, and the spiritual residue of Southern Black life. “Painting is alive—a deity that brings the dead back to life and allows what is absent to appear present.” “Sun Goin’ Down” refuses easy categorization. The works are both confession and apparition, echo and invocation. Rich in symbolism yet elusive in narrative, these paintings ask to be felt more than explained. They speak in the language of dreams—where trauma is transfigured into image, and gesture becomes truth.
Join us at Oolong Gallery for this artist whose work is already pulsating with the intensity of a masterful voice.
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PDF of press release click here | CV
Exhibition Dates: 06/06—06/25, 2025
Location: Oolong Gallery, 6030 La Flecha, RSF, CA
Gallery Hours: Wed–Sat, 11AM–5PM | appointments recommended w/ wider availability
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