Joseph Post

BFA Artist Statement

April, 2006

As my work has evolved and the bredth of my artistic knowledge and involvement has increased I have repeatedly felt the need to explore new ideas and concepts while improving and expounding on my interests. Currently, I am interested in the relationship between painting as art and mass media imagery and the place where there is a tension in my work beyond the imagery.

The relationship between artist and society is important to me. I can identify the purpose of my art as social criticism. The relationships shared among race, politics, humor, and fear are all sources and subjects of my work. The evolution of my work is rooted in my cultural heritage and upbringing oversees. I have lived in Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, England, Kenya and Spain and I soaked in those places. For the past five years I have lived in the United States. My understanding of social structures and relationships has been shaped by my experiences. I have witnessed terrorism in three different cultures, and I have watched as these cultures have reacted and indeed, interacted. In Nairobi I heard the bombs, which destroyed the American Embassy, in America I watched airplanes smash into the towers, live on television, and in Spain I woke up to the destruction of the subway system I rode everyday. I have watched intently the reactions to these events and others, and have seen the continuation and evolution through the mass media of a culture of fear in America.

My work is based on my skepticism of the mainstream American narrative. A narrative defined by a confusion of the American Dream and America's role as last remaining superpower. While I mine mass media sources for subject matter I recognize that I am following Warhol, the Independent Group, and other artists of the sixties in such an engagement of the mass media and mass culture. Pop Art long ago borrowed from the mass media, but their task was never completed. I agree with critic Lawrence Alloway who describes the consequence of mass media as it "gives perpetual lessons in assimilation, instruction in role-taking, the use of new objects, and the definition of changing relationships" (716). Further, I agree with Alloway that the role of art is "is to be one of the possible forms of communication in an expanding framework that also includes that mass arts" (716). The role of the contemporary artist then is tied to mass media, as consumer and as contributor.