Gary Cannone (Guerino Giovanni Cannone) was born in 1964 to Italian immigrants working factory jobs in Chicago. He learned english from American 70s television and was obsessed with Norm Crosby, Carol Burnett, the Three Stooges, Mad Magazine, Wacky Packages, and the Marx Brothers. His grandfather (and namesake) was crushed to death by a pool table the day before Cannone’s eighth birthday in a warehouse accident.
He played in the early 80s leftist punk rock band The Leeches but, as his interest in performing music waned, he saw Vito Aconcci lecture and decided to become an artist. Cannone exhibited conceptual and often dadaistic art while headquartered from Chicago, Rome, and Los Angeles until he was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2013. As the disease took a toll on his body, he took a hiatus but began to work again digitally using social media to distribute art and jokes. Interest in his communal project of parody album covers “Albums by Conceptual Artists” led to invitations to exhibit again. He began exploring the effects of his disease on his body and brain which led him back to the comedic tropes he loved so much as a youngster; adressing his disability through the lens of slapstick rather than advocacy.
Cannone’s recent work can be described as a decidedly reductive art executed with the deft skill of a prop comic. The resulting ensemble explores fragility, instability, urges, communication, humiliation, tension, torture, gravity, parody, dexterity, and death.
