Artist Statement

If the artist is to remain relevant in today’s media landscape, which is saturated with more visual information than we can process, then their artwork must be engaging. But not in the sense that it merely grabs our attention. This engagement is eternal, conveying a dialogue in which the artwork penetrates the viewer and the viewer the artwork. The process of viewing an artwork affects both the viewer and that which is being viewed.

Art is forged by the artist in the furnace of personal experience and human history. Fabricated in the present with an eye to the past, the artwork projects itself into the future. In this manner, art provides the viewer with an opportunity to take part in a discourse outside of time and space and brings to bear not only the experience and knowledge of the artist but that of the viewer as well. Thoughts, feelings, experiences, recollections of the artist and the viewer intermingle, coalesce and tangle with one another. In such a process the viewer discovers something they already knew but were unaware of, or perhaps simply something completely new and novel. Regardless, the end effect is that the artwork has altered the viewers perception of the world or perhaps even raised their consciousness.

Advertising and mass media are a substance similar to art, slipping unnoticed past the threshold of our conscious mind and steering us to desire things we might not otherwise. I also intend to steer the viewer, however, to a different end than that of adversting; namely a viewer more conscious and aware of themselves and more capable of making sense of the world they inhabit and in turn improving the quality of their choices.

Joshua Hoskins, Berlin, 2022