Image
Josh Meier
He Makes the Figs Our Mouths to Meet
and Throws the Melons at Our Feet
This collection of work investigates the relationship between the painted image and the cast subject. Each work brings together two or more objects and images into one perceptual experience. By compressing the visual contradictions of pictorial and physical space, my work argues for a simultaneity of conditions and emotions. I find orientation and perception endlessly fascinating phenomena in painting, not only for their relationship to optics and the mechanics of the eye, but for their wider connotations in culture, politics, sexuality, and selfhood. I experience the cast form of the human body as an autonomy-ambiguous object, one that struggles against a clear delineation between outer world and inner life and something ripe for metaphor and allegory. Mold-making, casting, and repeating discrete areas of the body engenders an uncanniness, an odd sensation of the always already present, in part due to their disconnection from an original whole and especially because most of the casts are of my own body. The images I choose to paint are similarly collected and fragmented from a web of contexts that conflate diaristic intimacies and the public realm. In combining painting and bas-relief surfaces, I am interested in how two material realities can hybridize to produce a new, unanticipated, reimagined self-portraiture.
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
