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DOLDRUMS by Joshua Nissen King

The endless fog of memory blankets the awareness of time. Objects and faces that once took you back to a specific time and place are losing their definition; they have become trapped in a peripheral existence. Some memories are still alive amongst the debris and decomposing remnants of thought, we water those memories like dying houseplants. There in the pile of clutter where we least expect to derive growth, we find exactly that, growth, like a sprout amidst a pile of compost. Even the most fleeting and insignificant memory was still remembered, and in its deconstruction it yields something necessary to proceed.

Lost in the soft lull of infinite fog we are still informed and reminded by the most non-integral items, they still hold weight even in their mundane existence they can bear fruit. The plastic flagging of a trail dictates which way to travel. It is that inevitable artificiality in the natural landscape that serves as a trigger, more often than not, just as it takes longer for the plastic to return to the earth, it takes longer for those triggers and symbols assigned to our memories to deteriorate.

Joshua Nissen King is a contemporary painter living and working in San Francisco. He was born in Biloxi, Mississippi in 1987 and raised in the Bay Area. King received his BFA from California State University, San Francisco. He is a key founder of the SOMA based gallery and artist collective Merchants of Reality. King attended Oxbow School of the Arts and was a student of California State Summer School of the Arts prior to his college career. He received the Robert Mondavi Foundation scholarship as well as the Martin Wong scholarship.

Joshua Nissen King’s work questions the traditional and classical practices while still referencing them. His work explores the construct of ‘correct’ vs. ‘incorrect’ in the application of medium, the illusion of perspective as well as the social dynamic in the presentation of the figure in imaginary space.

Find and Follow:

www.joshuanissenking.com | www.artcaveuno.tumblr.com | Instagram- @nissen_king

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 Students from the Department of Art Practice at University of California, Berkeley showcase video architecture, while exploring various genres, compositional approaches, tactical media and abstraction, time lapse and animation. Each student shares introspective, experimental, and documentary video utilizing metaphor, symbolism and poetic gestures to construct narratives drawn from personal experiences which have shaped their worldview, personal philosophy, or to raise awareness about an issue. In this collection of works, the artists design an experiential journey for the viewers, while exploring what has influenced their own way of seeing and the lens through which they observe the world.