Please redirect your traffic

Friends,
I've moved this blog to joshuacox.tumblr.com.

Please visit me there.

Yours,
Josh

Film and the 'real'

The capability of film to portray the ‘real’ is powerful, much more powerful than straight photography, which is limited by its finite nature. A photograph captures a moment, while film captures a length of time. A photograph is, by its very nature, an end to a moment. The moment the photograph is taken, the moment is at an end. Photographs suggest a ‘then’ quality, whereas cinematic narrative keeps attention on the ‘now’ aspect of the activity presented.

My use of film to capture the banal and mundane in my life is fitting then, because of the nature of the mundane to exist in the now and always. Habit dulls the mind, but it can also be comforting. The mundane has the ability to serve as a tool for substitution or repression. Focusing on the “mundane, everyday experiences that seem more likely to be partial, or more precisely screen memories for something else – substitutions or reframings in order to compensate for the blocked, unwanted and repressed memory.”1

1. Anthony Vidler, Warped Space, pg. 164

From the outset the world forms itself around me

Research and mapping

Preliminary ideas for House Project

"Houses evolve very much on their own through the inhabitants who modify them." - Linda Taalman, "Trespassing: Houses x Artists"

You can’t draw a square by actually drawing a square. You draw a square by using straight lines to distinguish a particular area of space from the rest of space. The space defined by the lines represent a square. Lines define space, both artificial and real – squares, walls, floors, borders, horizons, etc. I like lines because I like to have control of my life.

Maybe that’s why I draw so many buildings. Architecture itself is a form of control - buildings define space and control interactions between people (at least geographically). I don’t particularly care about the specifics of the buildings – where is it, why was it made, who works in, or even what it looks like. Rather, I’m drawn to the nature of the lines used to create buildings. There can’t be any ambiguity with these lines, floors must be floors, walls must divide space. I use these same sorts of lines to draw and it’s the process of making those marks that interests me. I’m drawn to architecture because of the ‘control’ that’s necessarily involved in building the structures. And because of the control necessary to draw them.

Freud describes the uncanny as the “transformation of something that once seemed homely into something decidedly not so.” The architectural uncanny occurs when our experience within a space doesn’t match our expectations. When the reality of ‘home’ can’t survive our idealized picture of domesticity and nostalgia, we feel betrayed by our own expectations. In my paintings and video pieces, I depict the uncanny by contrasting the structure and order of architecture with the randomness and instability of emotion and memory.