From December 10th, 2019 to January 17, 2020, BoxHeart Gallery is proud to present Joshua Hogan : Spiraling as Luminous They Climb Oblivion on exhibit in our main gallery. With a reality most akin to the Surrealists, Hogan’s painted shapes are a complex web of random exchanges that lie in the unconscious and its disruptive disconnection of signified relations. 

In today’s world, sense-of-self is perceived and measured by how presence (your story) is presented, viewed, and shared in an invisible world. Presence and connectivity are visible and invisible now, and both are real. The internet of everything (IoE) will continue to affect, form, and reshape all of us. With advances like 5G technology, the visible and invisible worlds reflect and refract. Our forms of presence and connectivity are altered again. Though there are many ways that presence and connectivity in an invisible world has made it easier to be an artist, these projected selves can leave the selves in the visible world isolated – even in all the connectivity.

Hogan’s paintings are an allegory for the interactions he experiences and the relationships between people in his own personal story. The act of painting requires the letting go of perceived memory in exchange for the opportunity to see something new. Painting is how he interprets the stories running through his mind that affect, form, and reshape his own sense-of-self. Some paintings begin with a personal feeling of disappointment but find resolution as the interaction of shapes find a sense of purpose. In other paintings, Hogan’s shapes can’t find resolution. Patterns interfere and cause delay in the ability to get attention or gain acceptance. The atmospheric shifts of color in his paintings introduce a new spectrum to the visible world and describe what it might look like to see through this world. Hogan embraces the fact that interactions between us are now also defined by the meeting of our projected selves. Although, it is often a troubling experience, he attempts to imagine and capture what it just might look like in this internet of things (IoT), all-at-once luminous space and data-space.

In 2001, Hogan opened BoxHeart Gallery in Pittsburgh's Bloomfield neighborhood and began exhibiting fellow emerging and mid-career artists whose artwork exemplifies the diversity and originality of contemporary art. Since then, he has exhibited hundreds of regional, national, and international artists while maintaining his own art studio. Through IATSE 489 Studio Mechanics Union, he also worked as a scenic artist and paint charge on productions such as Marvel's, The Avengers (Feature Film). Hogan’s paintings have shown nationally including exhibitions in the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Westmoreland Museum of Art, and Fallingwater’s Huntington Museum as well as internationally in the Love Art Fair in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His paintings have appeared in several film productions including Bloodlines (TV Series), The Perks of Being a Wall Flower (Feature Film), and Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl (Feature Film). Paintings from his series "33" are on exhibit at The Haen Gallery in Brevard/Asheville North Carolina and paintings from "Bold as Love" and "Memories From the Future" are on exhibit at The Vault Gallery in Cambria California. His paintings were recently exhibited at The 2018 Affordable Art Fair in New York City, the 2018 Aqua Art Miami Beach, and the 2019 LA Art Show.