New Exhibitions Open at BoxHeart
December 10 - January 17, 2020
Joshua Hogan : Spiraling as Luminous They Climb Oblivion
(main gallery)
#artparty: Saturday, December 14th, from 5 - 8 pm.
PITTSBURGH, PA (November 12th, 2019) – From December 10th, 2019 through January 17, 2020, BoxHeart is proud to present Joshua Hogan: Spiraling as Luminous They Climb Oblivion on exhibit in the 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.
Reception with the Artist
Joshua Hogan: Spiraling as Luminous They Climb Oblivion will be on exhibit from December 10th, 2019 through January 17, 2020 in BoxHeart’s main gallery. The exhibition coincides with our upstairs gallery exhibit John Eastman: Signals. The reception with the artists will be held Saturday, December 14th, from 5 - 8 pm. It is free and open to the public.
December 10 - January 17, 2020
John Eastman : Signals
(upstairs gallery)
#artparty: Saturday, December 14th, from 5 - 8 pm.
PITTSBURGH, PA (November 12th, 2019) – From December 10th through January 17th, BoxHeart is proud to present John Eastman: Signals on exhibit in our 2nd-floor gallery.
Throughout life, humans often look to signs or signals for meaning and direction. Whether presented in the form of traffic signals, directional arrows, or numbered and lettered signs, signals are projected toward us for conformity, guidance, and common understanding. They are a graphic language to convey shared information between observers. On a deeper level, people tend to take personal experiences and assign meanings to them. When giving subjective characteristics to personal experiences, the signal is essentially internalized and becomes who they are. "That's a sign" is a common phrase used to both draw and recognize meaning in common signs and signals. Many people believe that "signs" are a way to access their intuition, decipher information, and find answers they need.
John Eastman: Signals is designed to be a study in Abstract(ism) and Messaging. Consisting of twenty-five paintings using lines, circles, rectangles, squares, and numbers applied in a formula-like style, for example, (+- = 01), the signals can be interpreted in many ways to encourage discussion between observers. Eastman intends for his audience to obtain their own personal meaning or message by observing his Signals.
Eastman is an abstract painter, wood sculpture-furniture designer, and mixed media installation artist. He currently works in several studios in Pittsburgh PA. A native of South Western Pennsylvania, Eastman frequents multiple areas of Europe and New Mexico. He started as a self-taught abstract painter of large works in 2002 and added wood sculpture and furniture to his body of work in 2010. Recently, his artwork has evolved into designing and building small buildings wrapped in corrugated sheet metal and painted framed wood, with art installations residing within, creating an exterior artwork structure, with interior art. The structures blend into the industrial past of the Western Pennsylvania, while reflecting the current neighborhood surroundings of nature, buildings, lights, and streets. Eastman’s artwork is often the result of long term concept planning and sketch-study development.
His studio practice is focused on working by series in multiple mediums of canvas, wood, paper, and metal, and now entire building structures. As he continues to work, Eastman is even more enamored with minimalism, abstract concepts, and space, whereas the negative space on the canvas is as important as the abstract focus object, and the bare minimum room is an element of the whole viewing experience. In essence, his abstract artwork is as much about the space as the work in it. He is in constant pursuit of what he calls true abstract(ism), whereas providing a visual object (painting, drawing, sculpture) that attempts to prompt the viewer into thoughts and impressions of their own, regardless of what those objects mean to him as an artist. If there is a end goal, it is perhaps to spur thinking, a focus, and communication between observers of the artwork.
Exhibitions include; "Almost 17 & #werestillhere" at BoxHeart Gallery, "Entity" at Art Smiths of Pittsburgh with Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, FrameHouse & Jask Gallery with Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, “Now" at Boxheart Gallery with Group A, Percolate Gallery, Joel Hersh Private Collector in Boca Raton Florida, Panza Gallery, Gallery Chiz, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, "Austerity and Self-Sustainability" at FE Gallery, "WOOD" at the Elan Fine Art Gallery, Associated Artists of Pittsburgh Annual at The Carnegie Museum of Art, and The Andy Warhol Museum.
Reception with the Artist
John Eastman: Signals will be on exhibit from December 10th through January 17th in BoxHeart’s 2nd-floor gallery. The exhibition coincides with our main gallery exhibit Joshua Hogan: Spiraling as Luminous They Climb Oblivion. The reception with the artists will be held Saturday, December 14th, from 5 - 8 pm.