Joshua Abelow
- Artist Statement
- Curator Statement
- zingmagazine project
- Website
Artist Statement
My work is a kind of abstract, autobiographical story telling. I use text, figuration, and geometric abstraction to piece together different narratives that are interconnected. Many of the themes in my visual work are also found in my writing as I am interested in the relationship between text and image. This particular painting is part of a series of paintings and drawings I am making, which depict a dancing figure. Kazimir Malevich’s Bather from 1911 is a point of reference. I’m thinking about the idea of the artist as performer. Or even the artist as magician.
Curator Statement
Numbers
They have a funny way. Supposedly, memory can store a mean or median depending on the amount of about 15 of those numbers in sequence and a bunch more of those sequences (like phone numbers) varies among individuals. There are tricks. When operators were involved, people would ask the operator to get Carlyle 5462 or the like, but then these switchboards became unpeopled and rotary dials became the milieux—each number on the dial designated with three letters in the alphabet, while area codes were separated by region and led on to an additional three digits. And area codes and phone numbers became proprietary. Business cards were exchanged with all those phone numbers. So were matchbooks. Things changed yet again with the invention of the, as it was called, mobile phone. Brick like, both in weight and physical size, phone numbers still abided by the alphabetical rotary code. Texting. A whole new frontier, first there are beepers, which are phone numbers but not . . . Now just names appear. But now one is hardly able to know 10 people whose phone numbers slip off the tongue without prompt. We air exchange by touching phones together, creating a database of several Kims and a few Jasons, even Joshuas. Joshua Abelow’s cycle is just that, a series of 36 paintings on burlap repeating his phone number, and the 917 phone number sporting some kind of phone street cred. But what makes the paintings pop is his examination, like Jasper Johns, of pictorial space, flatness, and semiotic play on what else “signs” mean. So vague but unique, a textural expression of space and subject, using color and medium which alludes to our shared contemporary history of both painting and communication. What does 917-847-7964 spell. That’s up for interpretation. Call me.
