Artist Statement / Bio
Concerned with the minor and major deviations in universal concepts such as time and space my work illustrates how no two people can ever experience the same thing in exactly the same way. By combining and incorporating two-dimensional mediums such as photography, drawing, and text based work into sculptures, videos, and performances, I create juxtapositions that evoke a response derived directly from the individual viewer's sub-conscious. It is important to me that each work I create can be viewed and interpreted in many different ways.
In my latest body of work entitled As One May Remember I pull from techniques rooted in traditional landscape photography as well as minimalist sculpture, presenting a series of 2-D and 3-D images that are non-site-specific. In a single space one encounters a set of serene pastoral photographs as well as a variety of objects modeled from concrete and mortar. The soft, meditative, photographs offer a balance to the harder, heavier, sculptural objects, and when placed alongside one another a whole is formed. For As One May Remember Themselves, a work that encapsulates what the series is about, I have taken a set of modernist inspired mirrors and transformed both their style as well as function by placing mortar directly on the surface. The contrast is stark and unavoidable. When confronted with the work the viewer is presented with a question - Where do you fall in relation to the art?
Joshua Schwartz was born in Oyster Bay, New York in 1983, and currently lives and works in New York City. He received his BFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art in 2006 and is a current MFA candidate at Hunter College. His Artwork has been exhibited internationally, as well as in various print and online publications, and is part of the Taller de Experimentacion Plastica permanent collection.
Joshua Schwartz
As One May Remember Themselves, 2010
Mortar on Mirror
edition of 5
32” x 32" x 4” (Each)