Joshua Evans-Hooper
London, United Kingdom
About Joshua Evans-Hooper
Living and working in London.
The intention of my painting is to enable the viewer to transcend into a dream-like landscape, indicative of film. This fantasy landscape entrenched with figures is an intangible site, a place not quite rooted in reality. The work is a materialisation of a day dream, redolent of escapism. It is a mental diversion exemplified by recreation and re-screening.
When do we get to the boundary of representation before spiralling into the realm of abstraction? The painting is an "optical acrobat", it uses the language of abstraction but it is still anchored in representation. For example there is a clash between the detailed figure and the block shaped woman on his lap; mountains are distorted with colour but feature glimpses of reality and arbitrary doodles and patterns are spread throughout to enforce this dialectic.
I work thinly over canvas with diluted acrylic paint and watercolour pencil, and then use deformed fields of colour to similarly deface and obscure human figures and landscapes. The painting is overworked and spaces on the canvas are left exposed to reinforce this dialectic notion. The brush strokes often range from gestural to contained marks and from facets of bold pigment to saturated pastel-like colours.
I use colour themes from a Google algorithm, which finds images similar to the ones I upload. I upload photographs of lens flares or expired film and look for unusual gradients and juxtapositions of colour in these stolen/found photographs. When working from photographic sources the tendency is to use restraint when referring to the photo, so as not to produce a concrete location. Instead I use partial ephemeral memories to obtain an elusive and indefinable scene, a space between places.
Digital technology is a component throughout the painting, such as the deconstruction of film stills and the construction of composition through Photoshop. The construction of the paintings identity is embodied by collage. I describe collage as a collision of rehearsed narratives, images are thrown and confronted into a thematic assembly. When working from photographic collage the painting becomes a recycled symbolic plane.
The characters/figures extracted from the film stills often share an erotic, innocent and aggressive demeanour. It is evocative in escapism to try and indulge in fantasy to mask fundamental visceral feelings of aggression and overall sorrow. I wanted to fixate on erotic and innocent source material which is widely inherit in old cinema to reinforce the transmission of the viewer to this desired fictitious place just as old cinema today seems fictitious and over worldly.
Escapism is a discouraging topic as our society is secularly Puritan based in that it looks down upon unproductive daydreamers. The painting is effervescent and welcoming especially through the playful tones. The painting is provocative and defies compliancy to not be an unproductive daydreamer, it becomes a revolt against existing in the real.
Education:
HNC Fine art - Kensington College 2012
(BA) Fine Art, First class honours - Kingston University 2016
Exhibitions:
Summer salon, Islington Arts Factory, 2015.
Elemental Co-ordinator ‘Pylon’, Stanley Picker gallery, 2015.
America Square. Cavendish Gallery. February 2017.
