Starting tonight, June 9, and continuing until July 7 is a new solo exhibition at LeBasse by Los Angeles artist Joshua Petker. This time, Petker steps away from his signature paintings, of brightly colored muses, with a series of more conceptual works. (You can still expect to see rainbows of colors.) This new body of work is called Adrift. Here is a mini preview.
“It has been said that all sailors are trying to get home and that once home, all sailors long for the sea,” he says. “The relationship between human beings and the sea, ships, and voyages has been an integral part of the human psyche throughout time and there are many famous shipwrecks in the history of literature and the artistic imagination. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Byron’s Don Juan, or Poe’s MS Found in a Bottle are all stories that weave the romantic longing for existential experience with the helplessness of being trapped at sea; they are about miscalculating the ability of one’s ship amidst a storm. The sea is a metaphor for the uncertainty experienced as human beings within the expansiveness of space and time, and the body is the vessel for our individual consciousness, navigating the weather of life, ignoring or rejecting the inevitability of our eventual demise in search of the next horizon. The aim of these paintings is to celebrate and lament this escapist pursuit.”
“The paintings in this exhibition do not illustrate a particular narrative. Each painting displays my interest in these ideas with images of light and violence, both dark and bright, and my attempt to fancifully explore the familiar existential angst of uncertainty while speaking more directly to the conflict of our lives drawing nearer to death.”
