Joe Hardesty
Saturday, 21 March 2009
Work from the series Text Drawings. Hardesty’s work with text drawings is a conceptually compelling look at the content of photographs and how one reads an image.
“I make seemingly simple drawings on paper that address ambiguous and contradictory aspects of our cultural landscape. By focusing viewers’ attention primarily through the use of text, my drawings work both as a concrete reality created on the page and as a changing series of interpretations as each viewer “reads” the text differently. I want the process of making art – the act of imagination – to be both visible and entertaining. Using only language to describe what the viewer is experiencing, the drawings inhabit a space somewhere between text, image and the mind’s eye.”