#josephasherhale

The old categories fail: I include myself in the leagues of contemporary artists that refuse to ally themselves with painting, sculpture, photography, literature or any of the classic cubicles that we have been asked to partition ourselves into in the name of professional scrutability and technical refinement. In our highly structured context, I find it is instead a lack of refinement which opens the window to the sublimely human as an artist. I prefer to see my work as intersecting modes of practice that I would rephrase as: dealing-with-objects, dealing-with-images, and dealing-with-ideas. From this standpoint, I also see works that I have accomplished in a role typically considered to be the role of a curator (the definition of which is rapidly deteriorating) as an extension of my work as an artist.

I would like to be considered good at what I do. In the contemporary context we can call Yoko Ono and Henry Darger, two artists seemingly alien to each other, “good” because they both stand for “real”, both “real” because they have achieved an irreducible internal logic.

The constellation of elements to my internal logic: violence, technology, animals, absurdity, failure, the sublime, romance, repurposing, the dialectic, advertising. My approach is often bombastic, but with a tender kiss.

My most recent work juxtaposes images of animals of prey, mid-attack, and text that obliquely references sublime limitations. The objects are collages of found palette-wood, wheat-pasted xerox printouts of low- resolution internet images, and oil paint. I cannot help but find the chaos of these irregular supports and the painterliness of a jpeg’s loss-of-information beautiful and tragically poetic - a direct corollary to our contemporary loss of signal, and taste for noise. These objects are the urgent promotional materials for some impossible, horrible, fantastic destination, an EPCOT of delirious suffering, madness, and sometimes relief.

I have no religious affiliation, but I take as one source of inspiration a quotation from Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s analysis of The Book of Job:

To startle man God becomes for an instant a blasphemer; one might almost say that God becomes for an instant an atheist. He unrolls before Job a long panorama of created things, the horse, the eagle, the raven, the wild ass, the peacock, the ostrich, the crocodile. He so describes each of them that it sounds like a monster walking in the sun. The whole is a sort of psalm or rhapsody of the sense of wonder. The maker of all things is astonished at the things He has Himself made. (quoted in Introduction to The Book of Job, G.K. Chesterton)