Joshua Hogan
With a reality most akin to the Surrealists, Hogan’s painted shapes are a complex web of random exchanges that lie in the unconscious and its disruptive disconnection of signified relations.
In today’s world, sense-of-self is perceived and measured by how presence (your story) is presented, viewed, and shared in an invisible world. Presence and connectivity are visible and invisible now, and both are real. The internet of everything (IoE) will continue to affect, form, and reshape all of us. With advances like 5G technology, the visible and invisible worlds reflect and refract. Our forms of presence and connectivity are altered again. Though there are many ways that presence and connectivity in an invisible world has made it easier to be an artist, these projected selves can leave the selves in the visible world isolated – even in all the connectivity.
Hogan’s paintings are an allegory for the interactions he experiences and the relationships between people in his own personal story. The act of painting requires the letting go of perceived memory in exchange for the opportunity to see something new. Painting is how he interprets the stories running through his mind that affect, form, and reshape his own sense-of-self. Some paintings begin with a personal feeling of disappointment but find resolution as the interaction of shapes find a sense of purpose. In other paintings, Hogan’s shapes can’t find resolution. Patterns interfere and cause delay in the ability to get attention or gain acceptance. The atmospheric shifts of color in his paintings introduce a new spectrum to the visible world and describe what it might look like to see through this world. Hogan embraces the fact that interactions between us are now also defined by the meeting of our projected selves. Although, it is often a troubling experience, he attempts to imagine and capture what it just might look like in this internet of things (IoT), all-at-once luminous space and data-space.
For more information about the artist, please visit his website.