Joseph Blake: shitty gods

Societies around the world have legends of tricksters stealing fire for the betterment of
humankind, only to be punished. The Greek god Prometheus’s noble quest to give man fire was
met with tragic consequences: chained to a rock in the Caucasus Mountains, he was endlessly
tortured by an eagle that tore his liver from his chest, devouring the tender flesh day after day.
Other stories describe mere mortals acting like gods, attempting to erect beings in our
image—bastardizations of the “originals.” In Dr. Frankenstein’s quest to create life, he created a
ghastly being who terrified everyone who encountered him. Abandoned by society, Frankenstein’s
creation sought revenge, acting as the murderous monster everyone believed him to be.
While Frankenstein’s monster slipped out of his control, Blake reconstructs images to set them
free. He thermal prints low-resolution images of human bodies he scavenges for online, scaling
them up to massive proportions and scrupulously layering text-generated halftones with his own
written text on strips of receipt paper. They become autonomous after they have been installed,
moving and breathing with those around them. The mechanical elements of the artwork sustain
these images for as long as they can before tiring out, allowing the images that come under
Blake’s guardianship to live temporarily in the physical realm, as if spirits drawn from the digital
ether.
The creations in Blake’s work are disguised as medicinal anatomy or classical human forms,
images that are traditionally considered “good” or “worthy.” But he works with the shitty versions:
damaged image files that he blows up, prints on garbage, fills with nonsense and love, and
stitches back together. Recognizing the failure of the ideals these images once signified, Blake’s
creations speak a new language—the grumbles and grunts of Frankenstein’s just-born monster,
the 1s and 0s of data informatics, the @s and &s used in Blake’s greyscale—suggesting that the
hierarchical structures that give way to high-resolution gods or perfectly rendered saviors are
dead to us. Their creator rubs salt into the original wound; he mends a historical rupture. He
chooses Frankenstein’s monster, Prometheus’s punishment; the desolate Arctic; the intimacy of
the crooked beak and the liver, formed inside an unhealed wound.

Joseph Blake is an artist. He grew up in central Washington and attended California College of
the Arts, graduating with a BFA in Printmedia. He has a soft spot for found images and
low-resolution media. With a certain skepticism of traditional printmaking’s sensibilities, Blake
makes prints with digital printers that focus on the material body of images, their transience, and
the shape of information.

Off Hours is a nomadic curatorial project led by Katherine Jemima Hamilton, Shaelyn Hanes, and
Ebti. We present artist-driven exhibitions that result from dialogue developed through studio
visits, ongoing conversation, and collaborative writing practices. Off Hours supports and
spotlights emerging Bay Area artists through thoughtful curation, programming, and writing.