John Doe Gallery presents Enter And Exit Through The Same Gate, featuring the work of Brendan Lynch and Matt McCormick. Brendan Lynch (b. 1985, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles)was a founding member of the infulential New York based arts organization The Still House Group from 2007-2015. Having grown up in Los Angeles, Lynch’s youth was a kaleidoscope of graffiti, animation, and the visual media that surrounds the city. Conflating high and low cultural aesthetics, Lynch uses a variety of mediums, styles, and gestures to explore the different ways you can interact with a painted surface. His deep understanding and connection to the evolution of painting gives way to his manipulation of these works in their truest forms. Lynch has excuted a number of exhibitions outside of the traditional white cube, using spaces such as bedrooms, cemeteries, and a chicken coop. Expanding his interest in playing with context to shift meaning. But always about painting. Matt McCormick’s work operates at the intersection of cultural memory and material presence, distilling the residue of the American West into a highly personal yet broadly resonant visual language. Engaging with painting, drawing, and mixed media, McCormick’s practice navigates the tension between historic mythologies and contemporary detritus, where cowboys, highways, and Hollywood dreams dissolve into the textures of lived experience. His work resists nostalgia, instead treating the American landscape as both a subject and a surface—one marked by erasure, reinvention, and cyclical decay. Fragments of signage, silhouettes of riders, and expanses of negative space suggest an inheritance in flux, a past that refuses to settle. Rather than reconstructing lost narratives, McCormick’s compositions act as palimpsests, where the West exists less as a fixed location and more as a shifting psychological terrain. Informed by his time in Los Angeles and New York, McCormick’s art is as much about presence and transience as it is about identity and place. Through his practice, he locates poetry in fragmentation, exploring the American mythos not as a linear history but as a field of contradictions—unfinished, unsettled, and always in motion.