NYAB Event - Bo Joseph "A Persistent Absence "

Bo Joseph "A Persistent Absence "

This event has ended.
At Sears-Peyton Gallery
Media: Painting

Included in the installation will be paintings and large scale drawings, as well as Joseph's newest series A Lexicon of Persistent Absence, created during his recent three month stay in Berlin, Germany. Within Berlin's famously cyclical layering of destruction and reinvention, Joseph found the "absences" to be persistently and inexorably woven with everything physically "present," a condition of inversion that mirrors many aspects of his working process. 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 visual references for Joseph.

From myriad printed sources he scavenges imagery of objects that transcend cultural boundaries and superimposes them in dense webs of line or as negative shapes over gestural fields of color. Objects appear as voids; spaces appear as form. Through chancy techniques, Joseph develops complex referential hybrids that invoke the anomalous and transient nature of material meaning and instigate new roles for his archetypal sources. Whether working on a fragmentary used drop cloth or on joined sheets of paper, he exploits the painting support like yet another intrinsically charged found object. The resulting abstractions examine how beliefs and perception affect the experience of "reality" and the compiling of collective knowledge; and despite their wide-ranging and often disparate sources, these works assert signs of ideological syncretism and contemporary interdependence.

Bo Joseph (b.1969) is a native of California.