Joshua Cave

I have been working with Joshua Cave for three years. It is exciting to see his work evolve into performance, sculpture, drawing and painting. These images are from my recent studio visit. I saw his newest body of paintings, which he titles Things, and his newest multimedia/sculptures, which he calls Floor Portraits.

The paintings feature “things” in the foreground, which are often floating over a monochromatic background. The things are detailed and colorful, highlighting them in the landscape of the painting. As Joshua recently told Curator magazine, “I have been attempting to layer significant and insignificant things as defined by mine and others attractions, in hopes of arriving at the creation of an alternative thing of inherent value, the painting itself.”

Joshua's sculptural pieces are a series of plaster slabs in which objects are embedded. Pieces of wood, dust, feathers, paint smudges, and bits of moving blankets peek out from the sea of white plaster. It seems as if Joshua has poured out puddles of plaster on the floor of his studio and then peeled them up to reveal the discarded scraps used for other art pieces. The pieces evoke a world that cannot be seen: a studio filled with pieces that used up the original wood, paint, and other materials from which the scraps fell. Is this the case, or is Cave just getting us to think about it?

Joshua Cave was raised in Worcester, MA and is now a New York City-based painter, sculptor, and installation artist. He received his BFA from Westmont College in Santa Barbara.

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