ABOUT | joshuafloresart

STATEMENT

I address my theme of memory preservation and decay in a detached, clinical manner rather than a warm nostalgic lens. Society needs to step away from sentimental attachments of the past and appreciate the present. Memory should push us forward in repulsion rather than be lured back in by contemporary culture. My work highlights on the push and pull tension memory has on humans in a manner that moralizes the harm of the past.

I fuse and abstract recognizable objects with an element of surreal or otherworldly, removing a sense of familiarity and comfort emphasizing my bitter feelings on memory. The prints, paintings and drawings I make, create dissonance from what is sensitive and beautiful in our memories into something dark and strange. My obscured, suspended still life objects take on the appearance of specimens or catalog entries, as if they belong in an archive. My technically rendered work invites and encourages the viewer to reflect upon their own relationship and mortality of memories in a extended dialogue similar to the one I experienced while creating the work.

BIOGRAPHY

Joshua Shane Flores was born and raised in Las Cruces, New Mexico. His love of art began at a young age, taking inspiration from the organic quality of nature and hard angles of the synthetic world. He graduated from New Mexico State University in 2014 with a Bachelors of Fine Art with a painting distinction and again in 2018 with a Masters of Fine Art in Studio Art. He is a recipient of the the Ken Barrick Memorial Endowed Scholarship and the Mary Lawbaugh Purchase Award which places his work in the University Art Gallery Permanent Collection.