"Sturgeon's work can be seen as a continuing process of concentration and abstraction. Through the process of a continuing introspection, the viewer of Sturgeon's work is confronted with the conflict between the rational and observable aspects of an outer landscape coldly portrayed in black and white video, and a 'mystical' non-objective set of symbols and activities constructed from the language of a variety of non-rational symbol systems. Both worlds are posed as mutually inclusive; both seem clearly related to Sturgeon's exploration of his consciousness." -

- "Sturgeon's use of state-of-the-art communications technology to express this basic concern (the coexistance of a highly personal yet completely universal kind of self-knowledge) is similarly rooted in his desire to propound the timeless in terms of the most immediate and ephemeral form of communication available to him. Initially, his work took the form of environmental sculpture, in which he dealt with what he perceived as the split between the individual and his or her environment. But as it became clear to Sturgeon that this mistaken perception had its roots in a more internalized conflict, he found that video was a medium well-suited to the kind of reflective and synthetic work he had to pursue. After making a series of dense, heavily-edited tapes, during which time he evolved a highly evocative personal symbolic language drawn from Jungian and Cabalistic archetypes, Sturgeon's work evolved from pure videotape into combined live and taped performances which even further exemplified the distinctions he sought to unify. The dialogue between live performance and recorded time created for Sturgeon a space in which he could fully explore his universal, yet personal, dialogue."

David A. Ross, director

Two Video Installations catalogue

Long Beach Museum of Art, 1978

"...The bat has positive aspects, most significantly it regulation of the insect population. In many societies (especially the Mezo-American), this mammal symbolizes metaphysical or ritual death and rebirth. The artist associates the hanging bat with the tarot card, the hanged man, who represents a link between the personality and the higher self. For Sturgeon, therefore, the bat is also a metaphor for psychological change." --

Barbara London, curator

TRAP/bat, video installation commission

Museum of Modern Art, 1993

In Narkose... "everything is there: the proximity of death and the syncopated destructible forces of a pointless war. The multi-dimensionality of this art is reinforced with the symbolism of a type of Yin and Yang pull between the context and suffering of "Operation Desert Storm" with the quiet setting of man’s ultimate metaphysical home -- the grave."

Elaine A. King, director

Narkose, Horizons

Contemporary Arts Center

Cincinnati, 1994

"The artist's communication is direct, speaking from a spiritual source within his inner self. He develops a tension that provokes the viewer, necessitating a personal response.... SPINE/TIME 's formal structure is linked by a chain of events that associate ideas, culminating with an emotional liberation."

Kathy Huffman, curator

Second Link 1983

"... Sturgeon seems to be representing humankind in search of its history and its meaning. In stylized actions he seeks it in earth and water, in the desert (as Biblical prophets did), and finally finds it in himself."

Anne Edgerton, curator,

Young Talent Awards 1963-1983 (Retrospective),

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1983

"For him (Sturgeon) technical energy is organized in a particular way which is not separate from his own being - there is a mystical union which he does not fear.... He tells us that his individuality is no longer important and -

'As the wheel turns, the knife and kiss are one. And in that moment of embrace, I am wing and air'."

Marie Morgan,

The New Narrative

Banff Centre, 1984

(Sturgeon & Quinn)... "add symbolic allusions as well as the electronic image manipulation ...to meditate on central problems of contemporary existence: on the appearance and disappearance, or location and dislocation of the individual in a time of tremendous insecurity and cultural change."

Bob Riley, curator

Histories: New Video Art

ICA-Boston, 1988

"Recounting a half-life of failed expectations through poetic variations of the refrain 'I thought I was,' Quinn and Sturgeon relate their generation's dislocation of change infinitized in the present to the disappearance of the Anasazi civilization in a potent perspective shift. Searching for the window of recurrence in the relentless curving of life back on itself, NOMADS locates incisive poetic observation in routine exchanges and reflections, consolidating five years of performance work that has sought a union of the metaphysical and mundane."

Michael Nash, review

High Performance, 1987

"... fine arts sensibility synthesizes video art, video/installation and theater in an improvisational structure that attempts the tricky business of saving the moment of creation for the audience...

Michael Nash, review

High Performance, 1983

"The performance is the quintessence of what performance is about. The hall of mirrors expansiveness creates a sense of quantum realization, Sturgeon and Quinn have risked the hour's totality for each moment, pulling off a brilliantly provocative present tense."

Michael Nash, review

ART-COM, 1983

"..regarding performance, the most successful was produced by John Sturgeon and Aysha Quinn (in Iowa city) and interacted with Gary Lloyd (in Los Angeles). Consisting of overlapping visuals and audio, the piece was wonderful to watch and provided accessible open interpretation for a general television viewing audience."

Carl Loeffler, review

Artist in Television Conference

Atari is the New Parent (satellite performance)

ART -COM, 1982

"The performances engage the spectator in questions concerning his position in front of the picture plane, an issue that has faced many artists throughout the twentieth century. That is not to imply that Sturgeon, as with many other contemporary artists is applying a new technique to 'maintain continuity with the modernist intentions of the rest of visual media' To the contrary, we are not asked to comprehend a parody of abstraction, but to confront our hierarchical frame of references. Innovative work forces us to establish new terminology and redefine our descriptive methods to correspond to the new object of our attention. In Conjunction/Opposition the texts not only serve as aesthetic devises but also provide reference to the importance of language within the work. In this way John Sturgeon pays homage to the origins of his questioning."

Peter Goulds, director

L.A. Louver Gallery

Los Angeles, 1978

"All parts of the piece have this in common, then: while their initial appeal is to the intuitive, the pre-rational, they lead the spectator beyond this level of apprehension to one of highly specific statement. The parts are gradually articulated into the recurrent patterns which we recognize as characteristic of language...By using his languages to signify in relation to a world apart from themselves, Sturgeon's primary accomplishment in Conjunction/Opposition II is to introduce the spectator to a reality which, while not autonomous, is nevertheless more profoundly real than the experience of either logic or materialism."

David James, guest critic

Conjunction/Opposition II, performance

L.A. Louver Gallery, 197

"At first glance John Sturgeon's videotapes and performances seem like passages of prose written in a foreign language and in this liberating state one is free to interpret and imagine all sorts of meanings. It appears as though the artist has set out to invent his own metaphorical ontology in the spirit of Alfred Jarry's pataphysics. However, over the past seven years, John Sturgeon has been steadily accumulating an inventory of iconographic images associated with dream symbology, semeiology and a wide variety of literary notions concerning self definition. In these images the artist is concerned with the quality of the gesture made by line, painterly surface, and meter of the art."

Peter Goulds, director

L.A. Louver Gallery, 1977

"Since video does not redefine established relations between viewer and prime object, but opens and develops new relations, its aesthetic capabilities cannot be understood in the wake of prior models of interaction. Video is in itself an unprecedented channel of relation through which the artist evokes and transmits states of awareness, sensations, perceptions, compulsions, effects and thoughts. Paradoxically, as the artist gives shape to this set of relationships, his role returns to revive the primordial functions of the shaman and the alchemist, since art becomes a record of process and not the manipulation of passive materials."

Frank Gillette, 1976

Masque in Real Time

"Video Art", Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

New York 1976

(quoted in Sturgeon’s catalogue

Two Video Installations, LBMA 1978)