As an industrial woven photo-collage artist, Joe Karlovec’s work captures and records visual data referencing my recent paintings. The meaning of the work is inherently tied to its materiality, a subject I find increasingly relevant in an age where electronic digital technologies overwhelmingly mediate our lives. The work is presented to undermine the art object's preciousness, dramatizing the entropy of its visual abstractions, and confronting the insidious dilemma of our modern existence. Its mystifying aura presents endless contradictions between the nature of image and object, digital and physical, and becoming and becoming. Even as the title presumes, the difference between actual fire versus the simulation of a fire in its household electric counterpart.
Artist biography
Joe Karlovec (b. 1986, Columbus, OH) is an artist living and working in West Palm Beach, FL.
Lately, Joe Karlovec's been interested in textiles and photo-based modes of abstraction. Many of his new collage pieces are studies that he hopes to evolve into large-scale sprawling textile works. Joe Karlovac studied landscape architecture before focusing on art. His recent collages stem from this experience. Curiosities around landscape urbanism & environmental justice inform my practice. Joe takes photographs incessantly, mostly documenting various landscapes from the rustbelt where he grew up, to tropical south Florida where he now lives. The work references both landscape imagery and photo-documentation of my painting practice. The result is a series of hand-cut digital collages on un-stretched canvas that appear as painterly and sculptural as they do photographic, much like the landscapes that inspire them.
His work been exhibited by galleries in South Korea, Italy, Canada, and is represented by galleries in Nashville & Miami. Publications featuring his work include Studio Visit Magazine, CreativPaper Magazine, Art Reveal Magazine, and the International Drawing Annual. He has a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and an MFA from Kent State University. Professionally, he has worked in galleries & museums throughout Ohio & Florida, and also design exhibitions for museums in Iowa and New York. He currently works as Production Manager at Farano Fine Art in West Palm Beach, FL.
Where plants hardly grow
Where plants hardly grow, 2020, handcut digital collage on un-stretched canvas
De-industrialization marks a shift in the relationship between landscape and urbanism. Places like this are ripe for re-invention, and can often be found where plants hardly grow.
Two flat tires, 2020, 17" x 12", handcut digital collage on un-stretched canvas
Economies of waste are inescapable, yet necessary to maintain. Mechanisms of infrastructure collapse the divide between nature and culture, landscape and city, and act with full autonomy like self-driving cars.
Lost days, 2020, 17" x 12", handcut digital collage on un-stretched canvas.
A demolished bridge shrinks back into the landscape. A primary element of urban order becomes a spectacle of detritus. The landscape again becomes the medium from which all transactions pass.
