Various Small Fires is pleased to present the debut presentation in South Korea of Los Angeles-based artist Joshua Nathanson (b. 1976, Washington D.C.). Featuring his latest works, Joshua Nathanson: Symbiotic will be on view from July 27 through October 12 at VSF Seoul.
In Nathason’s previous work, carefree people luxuriate in the idle pleasures of public spaces, from the beaches of Los Angeles to Shanghai shopping malls. Like a 21st Century Seurat, his plein-air iPad sketches are transmogrified through air-brush, painting, and oil sticks as LED palette compositions in deconstructed social space.
In his newest paintings, drawings and sculptures, Nathanson excavates the latent presence of the natural world within our digital age. Inspired by the symbolist imagery of the Les Nabis movement, ancient cave paintings, utopian fairytale narratives, and the phenomenology of digital displays, he manifests archetypes of nature as mediated through the experience of contemporary civilization. A hamburger, the concentration of massive carbon inputs through a software-controlled supply chain, awaits consumption atop an ancient edifice built to transcend the same Earth whose compressed substance forms its structure. The swan, an avatar of mother nature, embraces a human figure against all odds caught in a flurry of colorful chaos, abstract bits and pieces whipped around in the cybernetic matrix.
Thickly layered with streaks and globs of handmade oil-sticks in earthy and acidic pigments, Nathanson’s paintings and drawings are topographies of mud, water, sand and dirt, the inevitable mineral origins from which the digital world is composed. The sculptures suggest the paradox of social constructs as bound to corporeal reality through their mechanically chiseled wood-grain masses.
