The Ice Age

Interview with Michael St. John

By Monica Moran

10/27/2025

MM: Your new series of paintings addresses a current event in the headlines. Your past work has a history of political narrative. Do you want to talk about that?

MSJ: My work, for probably the last 15 years, has been pretty much involved with political headlines and cultural trends, events. And yeah, I would say there's been commentary for quite a while now. I like to say I'm a realist. So much of what I've made has been commentary on contemporary politics, cultural events, things like that. The title of the show is “these days (lost)”.

MM: Do you want to talk about the syntax, what it means?

MSJ: Explain that?

MM: “these days (lost)”, parenthetically. You were very specific about the lowercase and the parentheses and the word, you know, what does it mean, if anything? Is it just a poetic way of writing it?

MSJ: No, those are all paintings of the posters that people put up for their missing animals. And all I do is, I really am making a realistic reproduction of those posters.

MM: They are exact reproductions of found “objects”?

MSJ: Yes. They're the same size as like an 8x10 color Xerox or black and white Xerox that people put up, you know, when they post fliers for their dogs. And I'm repainting them. I tried to reproduce their handwriting. And the only difference is instead of making the animals photographic, I paint them.

MM: The headlines portray this population as missing. And you've de-identified them by using animal posters. How does that present a crisis for a community? Or do you see it as a post COVID living condition or byproduct or neither?

MSJ: I don't see it as a relationship to COVID. They're like metaphorical paintings of the conditions of people being picked up and just being lost. So, I'm using the animals, the lost animals, the missing animals as a metaphor for the same condition that's going on with the ICE raids.

MM: And do you remember when the story broke? What you were thinking? What was your first reaction?

MSJ: I don't remember when the story broke. Before that I was, I was painting these paintings that are much more about art. They're like art about art. And, and I stopped doing those. I listen to the news when I work. And it's like a pressure cooker. And I just couldn't not say anything anymore and just continue my “inside the beltway” paintings. I stopped making those for a while and made these three series of paintings. The first series was when you stand at a urinal. And there's graffiti all over it, just like people's voices, you know, saying things.

MM: And that's your project FLUSH, right?

MSJ: Yes. And I made those. And I made another short series of nine paintings, that were pictures of, of the world, but they're all out of focus. And they're like photorealist renderings of focus. When you see them you don't really know what you're looking at. And I made the lost dogs. And I think those three series are, are, you know, my response to what's going on in politics right now. Combined, all three, I think are genuine responses to what's going on?

MM: As opposed to, as you said, “inside the beltway” paintings? So it's a sort of interactive narrative.

MSJ: How do you mean that?

MM: As opposed to a my-way-or-highway pipeline narrative, you give the viewer an opportunity to respond in this interactive way. With the news, with the headlines, with what you're seeing?

MSJ: Yeah, with what I'm making. They're almost like a call and response, you know, the news is the call. And then I respond.

MM: So, in terms of how they're portrayed in a digital format, I chose the Bulgari 1980 diary entry. When Warhol is telling Bulgari “to hide the tapes” and it's “too high class” and “people aren't going to go for that kind of thing.” I don't know if you saw the new website with your new paintings superimposed with 1980s Warhol? It can be seen as random or interactive. The type of narrative that interacts with what you're thinking about? Or do you see them as related to this history of pop art—an headlines?

MSJ: I don't know what you mean. Say that again.

MM: Digitally it overlaps with the missing posters in a really funny way, because it's kind of random, but starts hitting on the stuff your posters are talking about and sounds kind of paranoid and interactive. Bulgari and Warhol, go to a restaurant and Bulgari starts telling Warhol to “hide his camera”, “hide the tapes”, “that they're not going to go for that” and “don't talk about communism”. Do you see the news production and your paintings in any way related to an interactive theme?

MSJ: Not necessarily. I think it was important that I had these particular ideas for responses to what was going on. And I just thought I would make this series to say something, you know, it's like, “if you see something, say something”.

I've used that saying before in work and I kind of do believe it. And, and I think the lost dogs and cats are really to the point of, “if you see something, say something”. And, and I think that's kind of what's going on with the ICE raids. People are doing that. You know, they're recording with their cameras, and you know, they're responding.

The lost animals are like my response to the ICE raids.

MM: What I find interesting is I think the ICE story is extremely important just as you do. But I’m particularly interested in the way you de-identify them like a Disney Pixar in some of the renderings. The same way Disney de-identifies children or people with their cartoon approach to AI narrative--or whatever Pixar is up to.

It's interesting that you're using the sort of pixelated, semi-pixelated cat that does like de-identify in a similar way.

MSJ: You mean the way they're painted?

MM: The way they're painted is very appropriate for high-end art, like blue-chip art, like you're a blue-chip artist, for lack of a better word. And the fact that they're painted for that audience. The de-identification of a completely heinous event down in LA. That's what I mean.

MSJ: Right.

MM: Pixar does this every day is my point. But maybe not for blue-chip collectors, but for the same investors or the same stocks. or the same, you know, like the Warhol crowd, the same old-school wealth. Not much has changed on that front, like in terms of the secular nature of art, you know, like a very inbred crew.

MSJ: Right. That's probably why I painted them like that too.

MM: That's interesting. So you were, you were speaking directly to that audience?

MSJ: Maybe you could say it's the hand of the maker by painting them that way.

MM: As opposed to the invisible hand? Like a computer is this invisible hand. You got this puppeteer behind the screen that's digital or algorithmic, non-existent, as opposed to art whereby there is a rendering and evidence of a hand?

MSJ: Well, it makes them made, made by somebody.

MM: They're made really beautifully. And again, not much has changed in terms of what's considered beautiful in art.

MSJ: I just thought that was an interesting way because there's one of a missing toy.

MM: Yes.

MSJ: That one was obviously drawn by the child. And so, the dogs and cats are a more painterly that continues with the handmade, you know, just like the child that drew the missing bunny toy.

MM: The interactive nature of the narrative holds up in a really interesting way compared to the really painterly stuff. Like, you get it, you know, and that one stick drawing kind of holds it all together, threads it or ties it all together, if you will.

MSJ: Also, the handwriting. To try to copy people's handwriting, because each one has a very idiosyncratic handwriting. If you look at them closely, sometimes people will emphasize certain things like the word missing or the dog's name, or in one, they emphasize the lost cat because it's a lost cat. So, you know, you have the name of the cat, but that's very small. But when it says lost cat, they make it really big, and they change the thickness of the lettering. They change the thickness of the lines. It's their way of having a voice, you know?

I find that very interesting that people like graffiti on the walls of a bathroom, that's a person, saying out loud, you know, their voice, their markings, their markings with their voice.

MM: But in an anonymous way?

MSJ: That's an interesting thing that people need to do. That's like graffiti, like graffiti artists, you know, it's their voice.

MM: That's kind of what social media did, it gave people something to do, a kind of voice that's maybe real or maybe not, you know, I mean?

MSJ: Social media is another way of using their voice.

MM: There's an illusion of that, and the interesting thing about social media is that people believe it. But graffiti, it's anonymous, it's there, it's kind of a marking, like you said, and it's a way of expressing themselves. I think the graffiti might be a little more realistic, though, is what's interesting, versus social media of which data is researched and sourced.

MSJ: Social media is a much more, you know, fact or fiction thing. But graffiti or like the lost animals or graffiti in a bathroom, I think I see that as pretty sincere. And whether it's a joke on the bathroom wall or whether that's a sincere expression of someone's, you know, individual voice, and the lost animals, I think are very, they're extremely sincere.

MM: Tragic, yes.

MSJ: I find people's expressions like that very moving.

MM: You seem extremely interested in other people's reactions to these kinds of staged or not staged events by the news media. Is it accurate to say you are more interested, not so much in your own reaction, but in the public's responses.

MSJ: Yes. It's like, you know, I think of myself as being a recorder of my time. So, you know, that kind of dovetails into the idea of being a realist. I don't really make up stuff. I find stuff. I find stuff that I think is relevant to my time. And I, you could say I reproduce it through a painting. Just like the out-of-focus things or the bathroom urinals, you know, most of those things are all found. I don't really make up anything. I like to say I have no imagination. And I don't need an imagination because the world is quite a paradise of imagination.

MM: (laughs) That’s an existentialist, big picture question.

MSJ: I don't make up stuff because the world is endlessly making up stuff. That's probably a very, very true statement. Andy Warhol was really good in his first, what, 10 years or something. So, when you're looking at Andy Warhol, you go, I know what time it is. That was an interesting time.

This is what was happening during that time. From the, you know, death by tuna fish to, you know, the 10 wanted men.

MM: In the way that the soup cans really pair well with like his portrait of Marilyn Monroe or James Dean. The people, I don't know if they really got that or maybe just the elites got it. But it took me years to get.

MSJ: I started using collage for a lot of things because Warhol could, you know, see a news story, have a silkscreen made, make a painting of that news story that same day. I use collage for the same reasons because I could respond to a news story or an event. And with collage, I could make a collage of that event pretty much the next day or by the end of the day. The idea of being able to record, you know, I would say that most of my work since the 90s has been with that idea and just recording my time. I'm very interested in that because I do find the world to be endlessly interesting.

MM: Just taking mental pictures, you mean like taking mental pictures of your time?

MSJ: Yeah, or, you know, it's just making a recording. So, you know, like in fifty years, it would be sad to me if everything was some weird, surrealist thing. I guess that would be a recording of the time too. But to me, realism is a better recording because the other one, I don't know, is like, I don't know. Anyway, that's kind of how I think about these things. I broke away and did the dogs and the urinals and the out-of-focus pictures.

MM: And I saw all three, two of which are featured in “our discipline of interactive digital narratives”. I'm reading a new essay, Interactive Storytelling. Was there anything I left out?

MSJ: No, I don't think so.

MM: Anything you wanted to add?

MSJ: Um, no.

MM: Thank you.