Statement
Central to my work is a fascination with the interstitial; spaces charged with the energy of possibility like the tiny spark of static electricity that jumps from finger to a doorknob. In these overlooked gaps are dream-like worlds populated by our ghosts and their many shadows, made solid for an instant only to fade back into the diaphanous ether from which they emerged. Not just the resurrection of our collective memories, these ghosts are also reflected fragments of our present and harbingers of a furtively glimpsed at future.
The incongruent images that intersect here are strange bedfellows bumping elbows in the gloom, sometimes entering into a comfortable dance, sometimes engaging in bristling conflict and sometimes the dance and the conflict are one in the same. This dichotomy is most evident when nature and human collide. Though we vainly try to domesticate and cultivate the natural world around us we are inextricably a part of it. We shape and morph nature, twisting it into almost unrecognizable forms only to discover that in doing so we are really contorting ourselves.
These echoes weave their own intricate histories in their own languages; mirrors that reflect our own familiar stories.
BIOGRAPHY
In 1973 Joshua Field was born in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. He spent his formative years in St. Petersburg, Florida where he attended the Pinellas County Center for the Arts, a competitive four-year high school for the arts. Field later attended the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore where he earned his BFA. At MICA, he focused on assemblage/collage and poetry, and was mentored by Joe Cardarelli, a renowned beat poet and friend of Alan Ginsberg, Andrei Codrescu, Anselm Hollo and Robert Creeley. In the 90’s Field moved back to the Berkshires where he maintained a studio in North Adams, Massachusetts, home to the largest contemporary art museum on the east coast, MassMoCA. In 2015 he joined the faculty at the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design (RMCAD) and he currently a tenured associate professor of art at Tennessee Tech University. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, from Chelsea in New York City to Berlin, Germany.Field is an emerging artist known for poetically driven narrative paintings that are iconic, psychological and subversive. Arrays of archetypical imagery culled from both the collective consciousness and the realm of the intensely personal portray both sociological issues and mythic individual dramas.