Record High

Artists

• Josh Meier

Statement

"Record High" is a collection of paintings that begin from staged props of figures set against constructed backdrops. Much like a model, the painted figures are lit in camouflage or linked ambiguously to their environments. The tension in painting a living object and freezing it into a picture-state is a sample of the metanarrative of painting. It is deadened by its thingness and livened through its repeated appeals towards sentience. Observation and invention collate to rendered bodies that disappear and reappear in rapid unfolding - bouncing from surface to air, air to surface. Like Peter Pan’s shadow game: painting is a self, a reflection, and an autonomous object of its own. Androgyny can be a mutable, skeptical answer to the question are you a boy or a girl? An answer to what is present to us that is exempt from the authority of the body. A high that’s recorded as temperature, heat inside a painting, a rainbow patina, a chemical somersault, an ocular hopscotch, a doubling that extends beyond the paintings, through the window onto the street outside, eyes switched on.