TOTAL DESTRUCTION

TOTAL DESTRUCTION by John Trefry. In December 2024, two weeks after the publication of his masterwork, MASSIVE, John Trefry was admitted to the hospital in Kansas City for a planned surgery to replace his congenitally defective aortic valve with a mechanical prosthetic. In the aftermath of the surgery he suffered a stroke and kidney failure and spent the entire winter recuperating and much of the next year in rehabilitation. TOTAL DESTRUCTION is a therapeutic return to writing practice, indulgence in a process Trefry has dubbed “womping” (“writing on my phone”), and a study in “sloppy entanglement,” with foci on many of his career-long interests, including textural variegation and cultural omnivorousness. With the help of videos made by Chris Hunt and Samanta Garcia the project snowballed into a frenetic mosaic of subject matters, inquiries, intertextuality, and cultural nodes, from John Stamos’s frustrations in voicing the animated IRON MAN, to the paintings of Francis Bacon, to the openness of chess, to various famous decapitations, to an artist who preserves violent crime scenes, to the architecture of Pizza Hut, to the interconnection of the mechanics of human sexuality and motifs of violence in art. This is Trefry at his most accessible and humorous. Read more