John McShea ’25 debuted his visual art collection “Dopamine” to an intimate crowd of friends and supporters on April 4. The paintings are complex explorations into how different sources of pleasure affect personal memory and nostalgia.
“It’s all about how you interact with certain dopamine sources and the level of performance in relation to them. Dopamine is a learning drug, not a pleasure drug, so in a way we learn how to direct our attention based off of those things. So each painting is a progression of that level of performance in nature,” McShea said at the show opening.
McShea organized the show in an attempt to challenge himself to paint more and to push himself creatively. He completed about half of the featured works within the last year, and half in the two weeks leading up to the show.
The paintings were displayed on two floors in the Johnson Memorial Building atrium, allowing McShea to take viewers on a journey through different depictions of pleasure. The lower level was considered the “outside the body” section, and featured paintings where McShea was an observer. The paintings played with distortion, reimagining the photos he referenced in a more playful and colorful way. The paintings on this floor were all inspired by candid photos he had taken of his friends that he found particularly striking.
One painting featured on the lower level was in imitation of a picture of his friends from back home in Seattle. The two sit on a dock in front of a bright blue sky. One wears a crown and holds a joint, while the other holds a slice of pizza. Both look at the object they are holding, indicating where they derive pleasure from. The “outside of the body” section was a showcase of meticulous brush strokes and intimate scenery.
“So now you're inside the body,” explained McShea as he guided the crowd to the upper level of the exhibit. “The floor is red. You're kind of in a river of blood. The walls are tense. You're kind of in the skin. You feel a little bit more claustrophobic up here.”
In the “inside the body” section, McShea experimented with themes of impermanence. A memorable piece was a double portrait where McShea recreated photos from John F. Kennedy’s (JFK) autopsy. Though the image of JFK’s exploded brain is grotesque, there is a strange peacefulness on his face that grounds the painting. McShea's use of different shades of yellows and whites depicts the decay of human flesh. The deep reds used to paint the exploded brain seem to melt into the black background, reinforcing that death is a natural part of life.
“Thinking about the idea of the flesh and the body and impermanence, JFK is such a figure of youth and one of those people who literally died young, so we never saw old JFK. So I thought that was interesting to anchor the rest of these pieces in,” McShea said.
Other paintings on this floor expressed similar ideas through their depictions of nudity and sexuality. These increasingly explicit and “grotesque” paintings were more obscured, and experimented with emphasizing some parts of the body while opting for a more ambiguous representation of others. Though we were looking at these paintings from an outside perspective, the uneasiness they evoked felt personal, and contributed to the overall “claustrophobic” feel of the floor. This was all intentional on McShea’s part, who challenged himself to explore how he could manipulate viewer reactions through different visual choices.
“I can make you uncomfortable with 10 strokes, I can manipulate how you feel, how you react, what you connotate, with such few pieces of information. So even though I'm trying to argue this thing is impermanent, all this sort of stuff, I can kind of manipulate it in a way that makes you uncomfortable,” McShea said.
Another painting on this floor featured two bodies enveloped in one another, with a definition of the word “decompose” written next to them. Their flesh is mainly pink, evoking a freshness, but the accents of gray suggest they are slowly starting to lose their vitality as they verge on decomposition. The definition on the side includes the words “show more,” which is normally a button included in an online Google definition. Here however, the meaning appears to go deeper. Though the figures are naked, there is still more they can “show,” an intimacy that transcends the physical state of being, remaining even as the body begins to decompose.
The final painting in the exhibit was of McShea’s three friends sitting on a couch, only their bodies were completely undefined. Instead, they were amorphous white shapes with a few details drawn with pencil. McShea believed this to be a hopeful ending to the collection, showing how even when the body is not explicitly depicted, its presence can still be felt.
“Most of these are memories of my life experiences that I remember extremely fondly. And so through that, I don't feel that feeling of nostalgia is negative. I know that my body will never be as young as it was, but I don't really feel sad about it. The body's still there,” McShea said.
Ellie Trinkle '26 (she/her) is the Senior Arts and Culture Editor.
She previously served as a News Editor and Staff Writer. She is a Film & Creative writing double major from Brooklyn who loves all things art. You can typically find her obsessively making Spotify playlists, wearing heaps of jewelry, or running frantically around campus.
