BLAM | Josh Arseneau

Using wall painting and an engine as a sculptural focal point, BLAM! explores spectacle and futility. BLAM! is part of an ongoing process of combining appropriated imagery from current and historical contexts with personal experiences, memories and opinions. For this installation, the engine is used as a symbol of tragedy, a point of reflection and an element of projection and influence on the imagery wrapping the walls around the engine, around the viewer. BLAM! is also a questioning of how the use of imagery from horrible events as art makes a stronger piece of political art or changes the relevance and validation of the experiences of the people/communities involved.

Josh Arseneau was born in a small town in Missouri in April of 1975 and remembers living in Battle Mountain, Nevada, where he painted the back porch and some rocks with water - again and again. He soon moved to Oklahoma, where his first strong memory of seeing art was a full size reproduction of Seurat's La Grande Jatte at the public library. For years Josh lived in Salt Lake City and painted the leather jackets of fellow punkers before escaping to Portland, Oregon. He graduated from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2004 with a BFA in painting; his senior thesis examined the intersection of childhood and war in West Africa. Josh continues to live in Portland and loves to travel outside of the United States.