- 5 days ago

Joe Camoosa

Written by Kristen T. Woodward, curator, MFA, professor of art, Albright College.

Joe Camoosa is a well-established painter with an exhibition record rooted in premier galleries throughout the Southeastern United States, and museums including MOCA Georgia, Atlanta Contemporary, The Hudgens Center for the Arts, Marietta Cobb Museum of Art, and The Georgia Museum of Art. He has held membership in the Studio Artists Program at Atlanta Contemporary, was a 2016-2017 Walthall Artist Fellow, and currently has representation with Kai Lin Art and WhiteSpace Gallery in Atlanta. His paintings are in major corporate and public collections in Atlanta such as The Coca-Cola Company Corporate Collection, Sprint Headquarters, and The Federal Reserve Bank. Viewers may also recognize his paintings from films such as Selma, and Strangers, as well as Lifetime’s television series Drop Dead Diva.

Sound and sensory relationships are summoned in paintings and drawings throughout Joe’s studio practice, as forms teeter on the edge of abstraction. Billowing amorphous shapes are sliced through with cleanly bisecting lines, adding a tectonic visual hierarchy to high chroma colors. Joe’s recent series Searching for Sound harmonizes long and languid forms with smaller staccato bursts of primary red, yellow, and blue. Crimson lines hit high notes, and bridge cool and rounded low notes. Some compositional arrangements appear more structural than others, as pieces with geometric units give way to spontaneous gestures. Architectural passages as well as musical phrases thus appear translated into an intangible visual language, following the canonical trajectory of Kandinsky’s improvisations and Mondrian’s Boogie-woogie.

Joe’s mylar based collages forgo some of the hue saturation infusing his paintings, in trade for inky washes and angular panes of semi-transparent color. Slick surfaces with pooling swaths of black ink frequently run counter to more intentionally constructed contours. Figurative forms begin to emerge from gray ink clouds as if coalescing from smoke. Objects are suggested, but never fully revealed. Larger fields of negative space in these pieces correspondingly produce floating detachment of disparate elements, holding them together in suspended gestalt.

Shower Singer (pictured above), a 48-inch square mixed media work on canvas, features a pink figure on a blue and gray vertically patterned ground. Neither human nor animal, the abstract pink form contorts within the square frame, but avoids the abstracted water lines streaming down the canvas. Absent of identifying details, a shower experience still transmits. Run Out Groove (pictured below), a 48 x 36 inch mixed media work on canvas, joins layers of water and oil-based media to create an interplay of viscosity and movement. A large S-shaped veil of ink wash curling into a donut shape at the bottom of the canvas establishes a slightly shifting foundation for yellow, orange and blue stationary fragments. On closer viewing, concentric ridges within the donut shape appear to mimic vinyl album grooves referenced in the work’s title. But rather than presenting an abstracted picture of a record, Joe crafts a painterly homage to the grainy fidelity of analog sound.

Viewers instinctively recognize Joe Camoosa makes art informed by a cacophony of sights and sounds through his forms, reinforced by titles. He works towards finding harmony in the dissonance. His paintings generate aesthetic syncopation in the truest sense, as he distills his environment into the most basically understood elements of design. He has said he aspires to create visual images which function “like a song you don't want to end”. While his individual pieces can be read as singular visual melodies and musical phrases about life and art, an overarching interplay of color, line and texture creates a continuous, and boundless sound.