STATEMENT
Central to my work is a fascination with a dreamlike unreality where contiguity becomes the reigning principle. In this dreamworld dialectic, the innate and irresistible propensity to make connections drives discovery. Figures become either actors placed in vaguely familiar roles or witnesses to the action at hand. Others become part of a shadow world, sometimes made sinister and other times inactivated as they are engulfed in darkness or disappear into a diaphanous ether. One can’t quite work out purpose or structure but must instead abandon explication in favor of the exploration.

The hallmarks of narrativity, the recognizable way in which objects are rendered or arranged, the use of remotely familiar historical imagery, are all suggestive of a disjunctive narrative but deductive reasoning fails in the same way that dreams force us to navigate a landscape that is internally defined, at once familiar and strange. This use of narrative grammar combined with dissonant contiguity creates an autarchical world where the battles fought, struggles undertaken and dramas played out are all self contained. Much like the currency of our dream lives, the indirect language of contiguity; analogy, metaphor and simile are the lenses through which this world is viewed.

BIOGRAPHY
In 1973 Joshua Field was born in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. He spent his formative years in St. Petersburg, Florida where he attended the Pinellas County Center for the Arts, a competitive four-year high school for the arts. Field later attended the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore where he earned his BFA. At MICA, he focused on assemblage/collage and poetry, and was mentored by Joe Cardarelli, a renowned beat poet and friend of Alan Ginsberg, Andrei Codrescu, Anselm Hollo and Robert Creeley. In the 90's Field moved back to the Berkshires where he currently maintains a studio in North Adams, Massachusetts, home to the largest contemporary art museum on the east coast, MassMoCA. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, from Chelsea in New York City to Berlin, Germany.

Field is an emerging artist known for poetically driven narrative paintings that are iconic, psychological and subversive. Arrays of archetypical imagery culled from both the collective consciousness and the realm of the intensely personal portray both sociological issues and mythic individual dramas.

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS:
Division of Cultural Affairs, Burlington County New Jersey

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY:
2008, David McLaughlin, "Inside the Berkshires", Pentacle Press
2008, Georgia Fee, "Interview with Joshua Field", ArtSlant
2007, John E. Mitchell, "Mr. Field's Amazing Cabinet of Wonders", The Transcript