Joseph Harley Painter
My working process emerges through redirection toward inadvertent signs of creating. The unintended side-effects of my studio exploration - spills of liquid, foams expanding out of control, incubation gone rogue - hold a command over space and compel me to keep looking. How can I bypass my own intention and access the instability of these peripheries?
I work until something external eclipses my intention, and then follow in the direction it leads me. In my practice I explore how information emerges when the unintentional takes form: fallout spilling onto the ground, some stray seed sprouting in the corner, residue accumulating and molding over weeks, all folding into a system to which I concede. What happens when society loses control of its byproducts? How is our residue already part of a self-organized system of occupation, rapidly, irrationally, and inevitably turning against our parasitic global culture? Most urgently, how can we synchronize our perception with the pace and (non)direction of a planetary system? My process is to circumnavigate this sublime non-human. To be led by instability, in this case, is akin to compulsion, in the sense of a moon being compelled to orbit around its planet.
I work until something external eclipses my intention, and then follow in the direction it leads me. In my practice I explore how information emerges when the unintentional takes form: fallout spilling onto the ground, some stray seed sprouting in the corner, residue accumulating and molding over weeks, all folding into a system to which I concede. What happens when society loses control of its byproducts? How is our residue already part of a self-organized system of occupation, rapidly, irrationally, and inevitably turning against our parasitic global culture? Most urgently, how can we synchronize our perception with the pace and (non)direction of a planetary system? My process is to circumnavigate this sublime non-human. To be led by instability, in this case, is akin to compulsion, in the sense of a moon being compelled to orbit around its planet.
