Artist Bio:
Josh Alan is a Houston-based artist and educator whose work focuses on experimentation within the realms of photography and collage, delving deeply into the interplay between mediums. His artistic exploration is deeply invested in the political power of appropriation and photography’s role in propaganda and advertising. He uses these materials to dissect how image and narrative shape our collective consciousness, particularly in relation to issues of power and identity. Alan’s work illustrates the erosion of memory in an era saturated with media and information. His work invites reflection on the complexities of American identity steeped in entertainment and propaganda, and the blurred boundaries between fiction and reality.
Artist Statement:
My work represents a number of experiments in various photographic processes. As a self-taught photographer with a background in collage and painting my work seeks to merge these interests into one pictorial space.
I identify these works as process-based photography and implement systems of chance and layers of abstraction to my collage subjects. These images explore the processes of photogram, contact printing, scanography, and experiments with digital printing on found papers. I am fascinated by the collapsing of imagery into a single photographic space.
The moment we find ourselves in is transitory. My subjects, in stages of becoming and unbecoming, are frozen if only for a moment in geometric space. The subject is at once both past and future. The subject is America.
