Skins of Fiction
Recent Paintings by Josh Foley
3rd-14th November, 2009
Opening night Thursday 5th November, 6:30pm
Skins of Fiction, an exhibition featuring recent paintings by Josh Foley will be held at the Arts Alive Art-space between the 3rd and 14th of November 2009. The paintings are a series of striking portraits based on characters taken from a novella written by Peter Wolfgang Gabriel.
On opening night, Wolfgang will also be launching limited edition copies of his book, Skins of Fiction.
The exhibition is a creative collaboration between the mediums of painting (Josh) and writing (Wolfgang). Josh used ideas for how the characters should look by reading Wolfgang’s work and Wolfgang would include someone into the story that Josh wanted to paint.
The opening night guest speaker is Xydep Xydahlia who will play one of his songs which also uses a segment of text from Wolfgang’s book for the lyrics – introducing yet a further collaborative medium in music.
Are these very different and creatively distinct personas all one and the same person, or is there something else going on here? Interwoven yet quite separate, these three different artists, operating in different media, ‘talk’ to each other, cross reference and cross-fertilise, confuse and yet somehow conspire to make sense of it all.
The central character for Wolfgang’s narrative and Josh’s paintings is Orpheus – reworked and re-invented from the ancient Greek myth, changed in appearance and in direction and given a contemporary edge.
Skins of Fiction is a reference to this transformation, a visual portrayal of the central concept to the overall event – that various skins of information can be applied to something (an identity, a story etc) to alter its original truth – be that visual or literary.
Arts Alive Interim Director Ralf Haertel commented that “Josh is a very talented young painter who has been exploring shifting reality and perceptions through a range of alternative media and personas. This exhibition is an exciting new direction for Foley.”
