John Ancheta

Bio

Drawing from his background in set design for theatre and film, John Ancheta’s paintings coalesce scientific imaging, landscape, and digital abstraction in large-scale cinematic mise-en-scènes. Ancheta works primarily from found images culled from open source digital archives and film stills, but in the process of painting, he transmutes these images into imagined fragmentary topographies that imbue the cartographic quotidian with a near mythological significance. Often working with variations of a single image, Ancheta orchestrates serial compositions that explore the psychic dimensions of temporal and spatial simultaneity.

Born in Long Beach, California in 1973, John Ancheta spent much of his childhood on a communal farm in rural Northern British Columbia. Ancheta studied sound engineering at the Institute of Communication Arts in Vancouver, BC (1993) and Fine Arts (1997-2000) and Philosophy (2004-2007) at Concordia University. He currently lives and works in Montreal, Canada.