JosephDC
ABOUT THE ARTIST
My work is an immersive investigation into the society we live and ideals society has adopted through a four part series, “Social Topography”. Each part is segmented into family, social interaction, big business, mass media, and how all parts relate back to the self. The series consists of replications from everyday life, miniature landscapes and installations depicting the impacts and influences these social constructs have on our everyday lives. The shape of forms, the arrangement of the spaces, and the position of figures become a psychoanalytic survey. Pulled from personal experiences, the work defines our society’s reality through object narratives, narratives that question the discontinuity of the American Dream, questions the viewer’s object-relationship perspective and reveals the symbiotic and parasitic relationships within each sphere. Each piece reveals how we project and protect its ideals, how its ideals fail us, and how its ideals elevate us, offers examinations of society as function versus dysfunction, addresses complexity within the seemingly simplified everyday and channels this through the much more complex lens we define as “society”. In my work, abstraction of the narrative is key, leading to focal immersion which provides an omniscient perspective that gives viewers a sense of power and prestige over the object. This power enables accessibility to otherwise complex patterns and concepts.
A few topics throughout the series consist of: loss due to the overpowering or overwhelming and what/how we can gain from it, individually and socially; reconciliation in areas of family, social disorder, and work; re-identification of the individual and our face as a society through identity establishment resulting from advertising, marketing and mass media, while raising questions about how much control we have over the bigger picture; individual isolation, which can be seen in many of my works including figures in isolated environments and situations that relate to a society in separation and within these constructs the individual is seemingly disconnected from the exterior world and in a state of roaming.
High craftsmanship is very important for my work to be realized and understood at its full potential. The care and control I put into every piece holds a personal relationship to my thoughts of the control we do and do not have as an individual and as a society. I use many different materials throughout the development process, and will use anything needed to attain the accuracy of the vision I foresee for each piece. My work becomes an expansive endeavor of growth and learning, much like how I witness our society.
Contemporary is the practice and focus on the present. My work is of the now, investigating issues we see and don’t see in the everyday through our lives as a society and the individual.
"Enhancement"
Soft Maple Wood, Plastic Lego Bricks
15x25x35
On Loan by the Artist
ART Provides
35 N Main Street, St. George, UT 84770 MAP IT
We are located at 35 N Main street, in downtown St. George, UT