JOSEPH HART
Joseph Hart’s work is a collision of choreographed and happenstance mark-making, brutal editing and reinvention. Utilizing drawing, painting and cut-paper collage, Hart’s process is structured around cursory gestures: errant dashes, ticks, quick lines, scrawls, swoops and zigzags. This set of preliminary and exploratory maneuvers are then built upon, reconfigured or impulsively edited out until a composition begins to emerge. In his paper pieces, smaller scale drawings are often grafted directly into larger works, interrupting the initial picture plane while also reactivating it. The results are abrupt but retain a compelling and provocative elegance.
Hart sites “over-thinking things” as both destructive and critical to his practice. Works often deemed too tight, contrived, disastrous, or other, are disassembled and recycled into newer pieces, transforming the ghosts of failure into important moments of discovery and intrigue. Hart relies heavily on this act of revitalization. This system of working capitalizes on the unscripted, can simplify the complex, and champions micro exchanges between intentions and actualities, blemish and beauty, vice and virtue.
