John Riepenhoff

John Riepenhoff: It actually consists of copies that I make of the lower half of my body that I make out of fiberglass and wood and old pairs of shoes, socks, underwear, and pants. The copies of my body end at the waist and at that point they hold other people's artwork.

On The Handlers, I'm showing an unknown Wisconsin folk artist, Saige Rowe, who is an Atlanta-based artist who was my studio assistant and now I'm supporting her work in the piece; Peter Barrickman, who's an artist who I've worked with for a long time and show at The Green Gallery; Michelle Grabner, who is another artist I show at The Green Gallery, but she's also a curator and a big supporter of art in her own way; and then, a piece from the Whitney’s Collection, Society of Independent Artists, which is from 1922 and it's a collective work by a bunch of different artists.

In all my work I try to honor an idea that authorship isn't singular, or it's seldom singular, because a lot of ideas come out of community and collaboration and inheritance and lineage of different thoughts. So I really like this idea of including a piece from the collection that has a lot of different authors and is about a movement and not necessarily a singular ego.