Josh Peters

STATEMENT

2007 Photography taken from 60s -70s advertisements and other sources of popular culture are seen through the distorting prism of memory. The images are viewed from a psychic distance, but it is not ironic or coldy critical. Instead, the images are imbued with even more mystery and desire.

2007 Sakhalin Paintings
This series of paintings was inspired by the writings of Anton Chekhov, who traveled to Sakhalin, an island off the coast of Siberia. This island, which served as a penal colony, was populated mostly with women who had been convicted of 'crimes of passion'. The visual style of the paintings is greatly informed by the dynamic and dramatic avant-garde Russian film posters of the early 20th century.

2006 The latest series of paintings puts a twist on the traditional depictions of 'man as soldier'. The anachronistic helmet, first off, distances the subjects from the present day... keeping the paintings from being viewed as an overtly political statement on a specific topic but instead hopefully opening a window onto a kind of reverie, both for the viewer and the figures in the paintings, where the soldiers are not shown fighting but dreaming and loving.
"The Rectifier" subverts the celebration of male aggression altogether. The piece collapses many arenas of idealized male heroism on top of each other, the 'western', the comic book superhero, the samurai, even the van gogh-esque sky which references that artist who embodies the romanitic 'ideal' as it also depicts the swirling smoke of the aftermath of some disaster or battle.
However, the protagonist is denied his act of war/glory by the composition of the piece, which crops out the implied action taking place in front of the figure, almost as if a camera has been panned up.
The images are created by wetting the raw (unprimed) canvas and staining it with paint. The effect is one of melancholic, gentle bleeding.

2003-2005 My pieces begin by confusing the differences between the handmade and the mechanically reproduced. A small hand-painted collage, brushstrokes visible, is scanned into the computer, greatly enlarged, and printed out as a background to be painted upon. An ersatz landscape is created using stylizations of natural elements, exaggerating the 'illusionistic' nature of paintings. The way that these disparate elements varyingly clash and harmonize; the way that the elements rub up against each other, creates a 'frisson', and heightens the visual drama.
The birds, dislocated from context and recognizable surroundings, are stand-ins (for human figures), actors. The pictures can be read as stories... or as visual representations of emotional or psychological states.
The newest paintings are based around photos taken from my old yearbooks and from the magazines of my adolescence. The girls in them represent the awakening of romantic and sexual desire and, frozen as they are in the past, now also invoke mortality, memory, and a certain sweet sadness.