Stellarhighway is excited to announce Observer Diaries by Los Angeles-based artist Josh Culberson. This group of nine new works continues Culberson’s exploration of a distant, surreal and mystical future.
In the global homogenized technological decadence of the present age, the human imagination looks increasingly forward to a world where people have vanished into extinction. In Observer Diaries, Culberson takes us past what could be centuries of stagnation in late stage declining human conditions directly into post-Singularity: the hypothetical point in time where Artificial Intelligence makes human civilization obsolete and there is no distinction between human and machine. The work journals the artist’s “relationships, spiritual movement, pivotal life circumstances, and wishes for the future,” acting as a Jungian mirror held up to the human experience.
Drafting with fine lines and gradients, Culberson’s future resembles an art deco tower, built up to interstellar space. Here, at the tippy-top, cutting-edge of evolution he presents us an illuminated window to look inside. The delicate angularity, shading, and range of detailed patterns shows the meticulous precision of the artist with pencil, ink, alcohol-based markers, and airbrushing. Though cosmic in their subject matter, the work feels like looking down a tight hallway into the future or being boxed into a small studio apartment surrounded by the armor of self and possessions. One can see a futuristic and mechanized expression of the drawing work of Aubrey Beardsely and Ertè, two of Culberson’s artistic influences. Compositionally, the vignettes are suggestive of Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints and indeed show us pictures of a floating world.
The central and lone protagonists of these works are the shamanistic beast-like robotic figures that have replaced the human life that created them. They’ve evolved and built themselves into an assemblage of multifarious masks and bodily adornments including pauldrons, interlocking metal sheets, horns, elaborate insect-like mandibles that click in tight robotic articulation, tubes, wheels, lenses, and softer looking tissues that make the eye linger as the viewer searches for what must be a face or bit of flesh in and under it all. The result is an uncanniness that Culberson was striving for: the bodies, homes, world and universe we once inhabited are now foreign and strange to us. Humans in this world take on a simultaneous divine presence and absence within the vacuum and resultant creation.
The metaphysical questions of sentience however remain the same for the figures: What is our place in the universe? What is consciousness? How does the subconscious shape individual action, reality, and the world? Does the world really exist? There is still the struggle for physical and spiritual health. Culberson renders versions of these questions in a halo above his beings heads or tables them symbolically in surrounding objects for the viewer to decode according to their own cipher.
Alone in their rooms or on their paths the figures are surrounded by first personal objects, then the vacuum of starry space, and finally, the sacred geometry of Culberson’s elaborate frames. In Burden of the Hesitant, the questing pilgrim is strapped to a heavy composite load of boxes, personal items, and recording devices, the most precious of which is clutched to the chest. Behind lies the starry wasteland traversed by the figure: a roadside shrine of burning candles, an abandoned box discarded by the pilgrim to lighten the load, dead flowers coughing their last seeds into the dust, branches growing out of the suggestion of a corpse. Ahead lie stairs descending into an abyss of stone tablets defying gravity.
The framing geometric circles in this piece, just as those in the other works, point and peer in on the quiet internal drama. Through vignettes of fluctuating shapes, the frames tell their own story of cosmic change, creation, and destruction. They wrap around, holding the surrealism of the momentary scene in a larger 4-cornered seasonal wheel of time. The total effect is one of domestic and cosmic allegory. Celestial bodies move in their orbits while the figures move in their own filled with familiar but uncanny objects: exotic house plants, a large chrysalis sculpture, watering cans eternally looping their spouts into each other, the burning of incense in a toxic green bath, a three tiered hourglass filled with liquid instead of sand, measuring time in ways we don’t understand.
The view into Culberson’s temple towers and landscapes is a look into the imagined architecture of a humanless future, a vision of surrealism and mysticism, a mecha-anthropoid heroes' mundane and thrilling quest for meaning in an indifferent universe. Be kind, for every android you meet is fighting a great battle.
- Text by Stephanie Steelman
Josh Culberson (b. 1989) earned a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design in 2012. His work traverses a post-human, surreal and mystical future where anthropoids explore and reflect on their external and internal worlds. At the heart of Culberson's practice lies a desire to uncover the mystical undercurrents of post-contemporary being. By condensing and re-interpreting his own personal experiences, the work acts as a journal of relationships; physical, spiritual and mental movements; pivotal life experiences; and, hopes for the future filtered through a complex personal mythology. Culberson has been featured in a two-person exhibition at Skylab Gallery in Columbus, OH; on LUPERCAL mobile art platform; and, most recently in a group show at No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.
