Joshua Hobson

Artist Statement

Joshua Hobson
Artist Statement

This work is a continuation of my investigation into the fundamental properties and attributes of the photographic medium. This current work is primarily concerned with the print as information carrying plane, as a flat, cheap and fast abstraction of a state of things. The various technical and formal decisions all focus upon pointing out these conditions: plane, color, opacity and materiality. By concentrating upon methods of display I intend to show the print as a material object with specific structural qualities as well as to highlight the act of viewing and dissecting the image. I wish to elevate the print to the level of an object to be actively engaged and pondered either by direct display or with further interference by the intermediate agency of the camera. The interventions rendered upon the print act to disguise as they uncover, disrupting the viewers experience and partially negating the photographs function as an effective communication tool. Working in this way allows me to explore different notions of time, perception and empiricism through the mediated experience of a photograph.

These works represent a series of experiments that I see as interventions into the program of photography: systems and operations with the goal of dissecting the cracked façade of the referent. The varied methods employed have very different results, but ultimately serve to illustrate the loss of the referent and the impossibility of a static interpretation.

For the most recent iteration of this project I have acquired photographs printed on glass from a local production studio. The images typically represent an idyllic moment from a stranger’s life, a moment or scene they wished to preserve, to manifest physically once again. The choice to do so on glass reinforces the duality that today most images are in fact viewed on glass in an ephemeral fashion and the desire to make permanent and tangible, the fleeting image. I have taken these images, shattered them and then reconfigured them into pictorial and sculptural arrangements. This gesture is at once a negation of a singular reading, the birth of a new photographic reality and an engagement with the material qualities of the print. I have brought a strategy of formalism to my treatment of the image to complicate a straight and singular translation of the photographic language.