About the Exhibition
Opening reception: First Friday, June 4, 6 - 9 pm
Second Anniversary reception: First Friday, July 2, 6 - 9
pm
Are we ever really ourselves? More often than not, the way
we act toward others is but a slight manifestation of the
person we truly are in our hearts and heads; a projection
of a person specially designed to meet another’s expectations.
With this, who can you say you truly know? Your friends? Your
family? Yourself? Even interactions between good friends,
significant others and close family are no more than superficial
surface scrapes.
In his new series of miniature portraits, all measuring under
two inches, JoKa expresses this concept through his interpretation
of family and close friends -- people he is acquainted with,
but whom he might not truly know. A pointillist, JoKa uses
toothpicks as his sole form of paint application. Beyond giving
him control and precision, this process gives him a level
of intimacy with his subjects that conveys the subtleties
and (in)sincerity in each expression, and in presenting each
persona, as any artist does, he injects in each portrait elements
of his own personality.
When not painting his familiar strangers, JoKa’s common
subjects include charbroiled meat, sex, dissection, hypnosis,
corruption of youth, morbid obesity, swashbuckling, insects,
male-pattern baldness, bumps, self-loathing, ham, candy corn
and clones. His work has been called nostalgic, though not
by him. His art has been featured nationally and internationally,
and in national art publications. He is a carnivore.
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