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 must be eternal and convey not a message but rather a dialogue in which the artwork penetrates the viewer and the viewer the artwork. In other words, the act of seeing or viewing the artwork affects both the viewer and that which is being viewed.

Regardless of intention, 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.

Today, psychedelics are often spoken of as a means by which one could alter and perhaps raise their consciousness. Art is such a substance. Advertising and mass media are a substance of a similar art, slipping unnoticed past the threshold of our conscious mind and steering us to perceive things in ways we might not otherwise. I too want to steer the viewer, however, to a different end; namely a viewer more conscious and aware of themselves and more capable of making sense of the world they inhabit.

Joshua Hoskins, Berlin, 2022