Works by Peter J. Ketchum and Chris Georgalas. APP ART: PAINTED PAPER looks at human behavior as it is reflected and encapsulated in older comic books, advertisements, postcards, matchbooks, manuals and, particularly, black and white found or discarded photographs. For the appropriation and repurposing of these works, the artists have coined the phrase APP ART, or appropriated art.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines the made-up word sonder  as the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as our own—and those random lives are populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, beliefs, triumphs, failures, horrors, joy, and craziness.  We are cast together in this epic human story that links us to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, or in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, or as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, or as a shadow in a lighted window at dusk. All sliding towards a common, irrefutable, singular ending to our individual stories.

Ketchum and Georgalas are interested in imagining the way this uninterrupted flow of passersby thinks and behaves—the good and the evil. We want to comment on some of the wonders of being human and on the relentlessness of some of humanity’s less admirable traits.

It is not likely, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.  

This exhibit is a portrait of our faces. And our spirits.