Meet the artist behind the artwork
Practice and Intention
My art practice may be best defined by my focus on process versus outcome. While attuned to what I want the work to feel and look like, I am only loosely constrained by initial impressions. Instead, I am pulled to work with certain materials and through experimentation find what the work will ultimately become; in this sense, each piece is unsettling in nature. The components I mostly use consist of painting materials, found furniture, manipulated wood, hardware, and digital mediations - never permanently fixed to each other and often gathered and transformed into a kind of medium unspecificity. The craftsmanship I employ is mostly crude in terms of technique, placing emphasis on the work’s direct reflection of my thoughts, rather than a refined and elegant precision.
Tangibly Intangible
The amalgam of parts that make up my art are considered only momentarily resolute and concrete in placement and arrangement. I can remake the work over and over into different shapes because I perceive a fixed resolution as stagnation and perhaps even a death of a thought/feeling. My art is always about a snapshot of my own process of becoming, partially fixed in what they describe, but changeable like the intangible nature of the thoughts themselves. The objects and materials I use to make my art, while random are also purposeful.
Curation with Intention
I choose items that often have a domestic reference. I seek to use the domestic as a locale to consider the function of a queer body within the “American Dream.” I frequently remove the objects from their intended functions through various methods of alterations, such as digital manipulation, unscrewing, sawing, and orienting them out of their usual placement. These processes ultimately liberate them from the concept of mastery as I believe they’ve already experienced being mastered before and are now offered autonomy out of such bounds. Because intuitive play is so important to my studio process, the largest percentage of the labor exists within the thought process. It becomes a phenomenological experience where the viewer must meet the installations with where they are at and what they’re willing to consider and accept. The tension here is purposeful as a correlation to my own experience of observing people decide how they might acknowledge my agency as a queer person.
Explore the Artwork
Dive into the complete works of Joshua Steven Bryant Studio. Past, present, and upcoming works are available now to enjoy and engage with via our virtual gallery.
community, configuration, and absolution of boundaries.
While having spent so much of my life unlearning the bounds in which I have perceived myself, grieving infinite metaphorical deaths and celebrating infinite rebirths, I offer the objects and materials the same grace and empathy that I offer myself. I offer this in direct response to both my time spent chair-bound and as a queer in direct opposition to many spaces I’ve inhabited. The configurations benefit from my process in that they can be comfortable in the way they resist knowability and reject function and commodification. Like myself and so many within the queer community, each piece insists upon their agency and natural right to take up space outside of their previous usability.
Connect with Joshua Bryant
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