“it’s been a long time attempting to know nothing”

by Josh Brien
November 2022 to February 2023
Gallery 505 is a Window Gallery located in the lobby of 505 – 8th Ave SW

Sunlight drifts to skin surface, warming. Mist touches foliage, seeps through surface; inside, outside, and through. Fleeting sensations provide a route to reality, a concrete, direct experience. Soft, soft, reality brushes by. We are left with words, images; representations that can point to reality but cannot touch it. Representations that do not contain reality, they sit empty. They can only be themselves and point to what they cannot be. Focus on this pointing; keep a soft, gentle reality in view. A reality that fades in and out of the periphery and is found again through constant perspective shifts.

My art is a means for me to shift my perspective, to play with the limits of what I accept as real and what might lie beyond that reality. Adopting the attitude that words and images always fail to touch reality and can only be used to gesture towards what is concrete, I depict an alternate world that is not restricted by logical thinking and the systems of understanding that exist in our world. In this alternate world, meaning is destabilized, shifting and altering and resisting clarity. It resists a fixed state, allowing relationships and roles to change between works, as a way to move past the illusion that objects and images carry inherent meaning.

This world acts as a mirror, reflecting our reality in a distorted image with the goal of gaining a better understanding of reality and the meanings it contains.

Josh Brien is an artist from Mohkinstsís (Calgary, Alberta). He likes the feeling of sun warming skin and hopes his art can feel like that too.

We acknowledge the generous support of 679 CAPITAL, Calgary Arts Development,  the Province of Alberta through Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Rozsa Foundation.