Josef Isaiah Keyes
College Park, Maryland
Josef Isaiah Keyes is exploring life's delicate questions, practicing disciplines of philosophy and science gaining wisdom of knowing oneself.
MessageJosef Isaiah Keyes (b. 1990, Washington, D.C.)
Statement
My work is purely imagined as a blurring of the awareness and unconscious. My present abstract work is often childlike, a poetic visual language of an unplanned conversation output. A mediation through different layerings of the mind, body, and spirit. These conversations using a palette of mixed media are stories with a vocabulary of brilliant colors, with textual forms that dance and sit in a harmonious state of peace and moments of chaos. I use bold hues, mixing this with even bolder forms that create figures or landscapes that stream from the reflective atmosphere of the artwork. I am a very big child of life, curious about my human potential.
I’m interested in creating from an understanding of the Spirituality and the playfulness of one’s own self. This quote from Alma Thomas has stuck with me; “...Through color, I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man's inhumanity to man.” I’m invested in this dialog, the self-reflection between my mind and my observation as a human within our society. With a little under a decade of practice, my career has developed into creating myself as an instrument. My processes of and around my work form around inspiring and encouraging others to contemplate these works and ideas within themselves. To learn about who and what we are as a collective and individual. The differences and similarities we all have toward the whole.
My work to date reflects maturing as a human and, in turn, an artist. They are pieces, often a collaging of thoughts, struggles, and breakthroughs of a young black man living and understanding his place. I find this quote by James Baldwin to end with another reinstatement of my experience and philosophy of my work: “You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.”
The harmony of SELF.
I'm curious to know a few things while I'm here...
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