EXTRA: an ongoing conversation about art

TIM AND BO PLAY 20 QUESTIONS | PART 2

May 11, 2012 – 9:23 am

20 QUESTIONS WITH BO JOSEPH

1. What project are you currently working on?

I am working on several projects at the same time: my ongoing series “A Lexicon of Persistent Absence,” a series of large drawings just shown in New York, and I am also preparing materials for a new series of photograms.

2. Where are you finding your inspiration these days?

I have been co-opting imagery and visual references from so many sources for years, ranging from auction catalogues and encyclopedias to museum catalogues and photographs I shoot. Most recently I have been scavenging forms from German children’s scrap-booking clip art, which I started using during a three month stay in Berlin in 2009. I had three dozen of them scanned, enlarged and then laser cut out of acrylic sheets so I can use them like templates in the transfer of imagery to the surfaces of my work. The photogram series will start with x-rays of objects from a museum collection.

3. How do you see your work evolving in your most current stage?

I see a wider range of imagery entering the work. For a long time I was sourcing imagery almost exclusively from tribal ritual objects. More recently and going forward, my sources have expanded to include so-called “Western” historical and contemporary cultural sources.

4. What is your favorite place to see art?

One of my favorite museums is the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. I appreciate looking at the very progressive contemporary art they show in a modernized yet historical setting, the juxtaposition of old and new. I also like the Menil in Houston, TX, it’s naturally lit galleries and glass divisions create spacial superimposition of objects.

5. You have said that your time in Berlin influenced your latest body of work. How does the feel of Berlin translate into your art?

I think of Berlin as a very new old city: it is a city with a long history that has been reinvented every 50 years or so politically, socially, ideological and architecturally. They have also managed to document the traces of these eras so you can virtually be in many periods at once, wherever you are in the city. This layering of information along with the symbolic preservation of ideological icons relates to many aspects of my work.

6. What are the deciding factors in choosing the media for your pieces?

For a long time the deciding factors were intuitively based, involving lots of experimentation with materials, until I started to see devices emerge as a kind of personal vocabulary. As my work has become more contextual, branching out into non-painting media, the choices have more to do with how I might investigate and test my ideas. For example, I have been co-opting cultural icons in paintings and drawings, but soon will see how my methodologies stand up to the process of photogramography.

7. Confluence, your upcoming show with Tim features acrylic and transfer on paper. How does this process work?

I lay down a layer of non-objective gestural painting using ink-like acrylics, layering invented imagery as quasi-landscapes, simultaneously evoking depth and flatness. Onto this background, I transcribe outlines from various sources using transfer paper similar to carbon paper, often with the original ground covered up so I can’t always see what parts of the background I am drawing over. Using semi-opaque white acrylic, I ink in the negative shapes between the forms I transcribed. The result is a kind of stenciled or masked layer of negative shapes, through which portions of the abstract background are revealed.

8. We are seeing more vibrant colors in Confluence. What inspires this draw to color?

Part of the reason I work with cultural icons or archetypes is in order to investigate how their resonance declines, intensifies or morphs when subjected to contextual shifts. I am interested in color’s shifting resonance in the same way. These sourced objects become imbued with particular intrinsic energy through their making and through the proliferation of images. I see colors in terms of their energy as well.

9. What is the idea behind the title, A Lexicon of Persistent Absence?

This series began during a three month stay in Berlin in the Fall of 2009. Within Berlin’s famously cyclical layering of destruction and reinvention, the “absences” are persistently and inexorably woven with everything physically “present,” a condition of inversion that mirrors many aspects of the working process in this series. The symbols of people, places and ideas that no longer exist, in which societies invest meaning—whether carved ancestor figures in an extinct African culture, or paving stones set in streets across Berlin where the Wall once stood—provide many of the visual references, which are scavenged from field photos and various printed sources.

10. You attended RISD with Tim Hussey. How has your time together influenced your work?

Whatever influences we have had on each have been indirect or tangental to our friendship. I don’t know that we have influenced each other so much interns of imagery, material or process, but more in endorsing the other’s efforts and providing a supportive audience for each other.

11. What differences do you find comparing the New York art world with the one of Berlin?

In Berlin, the art world seems less preoccupied with status and more interested in discourse than in New York.

12. What is the most indispensable item in your studio?

A 5-by-6-foot slop sink in which I hose down many of my works.

13. Do you collect anything?

Tribal Rugs, African art, 20th century furniture, contemporary drawings

14. What is your favorite after-work watering hole or restaurant in NYC?

Still looking. I just had a great meal at the Fat Radish on the Lower East Side. That could rank up there.

15. Are art historical references recognizable to you in your work?

For anyone who looks at African art, European Decorative Art, or Antiquities, the references are there to find in abundance.

16. What under-appreciated artists do you think people should know about?

James Scott, Alfred DeCredico, Michael Oatman, Todd Bartel

17. Who is your favorite living artist?

Anselm Kiefer

18. What type of visual conversation can we expect to see in your joint show with Tim, Confluence?

A dark sense of humor and an appetite for the absurd. Energetic mark-making. Abstraction and referential imagery mingled in the same arena.

19. You talk about deconstructing images in your work as part of abstraction. What is revealed through deconstruction?

Opportunities for reevaluation. For me abstraction is an un-defining process. Deconstructive and chancy techniques provide some of the methods for intensifying this.

20. What are your aspirations for the future?

Collaboration with various museums in the execution a body of photograms, capturing the shadows of art objects “en situ,” as they are lit in the museum galleries. A series of large scale canvases as well as a giant tarp scroll in the “A Lexicon of Persistent Absence” series. I am also interested in site specific wall paintings incorporating gestural grounds through which silhouetted forms are carved into the sheetrock or plaster.

View more work by Bo Joseph here

TIM AND BO PLAY 20 QUESTIONS | PART 1

April 30, 2012 – 10:48 am

In preparation for their upcoming joint exhibit Confluence, we played 20 Questions with artists Tim Hussey and Bo Joseph. Starting with Tim Hussey:

1. What project are you currently working on?

My first body of purely abstract work, on canvas, which is new to me.

2. You were once working as an illustrator for various publications. What caused you to disconnect with that past and focus on conceptual painting?

I never felt satisfied as an illustrator– whenever I wanted to ‘go off’ with an image and be more expressive, I would be pulled back by an art director.

3. How do you see your work evolving in your most current stage?

I feel like I have finally developed a language of line, texture and color that is completely my own, which allows me to trust my choices and push forward quicker.

4. What is your favorite place to see art?

Most anywhere other than commercial venues.

5. What is the most indispensable item in your studio?

Goof Off hand wipes.

6. Where are you finding inspiration for your work these days?

My wife.

7. Do you collect anything?

Oh God yes, but I have calmed down some. I collect anything that appeals to me in the moment.

8. What is the last artwork you purchased?

A huge Mobile gas sign, with the flying horse.

9. What was the first artwork you ever sold?

A drawing of Popeye for a candy store. I was10. The payment was all the candy I wanted but I was so nervous I just picked out a tiny handful.

10. What is your favorite after-work watering hole or restaurant?

Taco Spot in West Ashley

11. Where do you get your coffee?

Black Tap Coffee

12. What international art destination do you most want to visit?

Berlin. I already visited the Art Brut museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, which was my dream.

13. What under-appreciated artist, gallery, or work do you think people should know about?

Johnny Tucker. His paintings and collages are really amazing. But you never see them.

14. Who is your favorite living artist?

Karen Dreijer Andersson from Fever Ray.

15. “Bathos” is a title you have used a lot in your most recent work, what is the significance of the word and what significance does it have to your body of work?

In short, Bathos means “false sentiment.” I’ve always been aware of too much drama and forced emotion in response to the world around us.The new work is all about refusing to label, to represent false prophets.

16. You attended RISD with Bo Joseph. How have you been influenced by his work?

Watching Bo at work had a profound impact on my process.

17. You have been deemed with a “twisted sense of humor,” how do you think this plays into your artwork?

I have never been able to see my sense of humor–to me it has always been an inherent response and so deeply embedded that it’s just part of my language. To me, my work is just a documentation of the ‘twisted’ behavior I see around me every day.

18. How do you make the transition between abstract works and figurative studies? What are the challenges there?

No challenge. The two genres cross-pollinate to only make each one easier.

19. What type of visual conversation can we expect to see in your joint show with Bo, Confluence?

We both tell stories.

20. Your newer works are large scale canvases, what is the draw to this scale and media?

My work has always been meant to go large, but I have been ruled by studio space and gallery space. With Rebekahs new space, I can fit all I would like to see!