JUSTIN BOWER
POST-HUMANS
interview JORGE PEREZCHICA
The bio on your website reads: “Justin Bower paints his subjects as de-stabilized, fractured post-humans in a nexus of interlocking spatial systems.” Can you expand on that and tell us about your creative process?
Well, I grew up in a generational straddle, in that I remember before this new technology (internet, surveillance, multiple selves, sliding gender and race roles) allowed for today’s new ways to think about humanity as a whole and as a subject. So from there my work evolved into the destabilization of the contemporary subject in an increasing control society, often using the digital realm as the environment to place them in. It’s almost an ontological buildup from scratch, building a new idea of who we are. So from that vantage point, I paint the current status or crisis of humanity today, and in doing so I am participating in an age-old practice in paint. The digital is just a new context or environment to be studied. I feel as though I am carrying on a dialogue of paint and humanity that has existed since the dawn of paint itself.
Do you have any major influences?
Bridget Riley, El Greco, Bacon, De Kooning, Richter, Picasso, David Fincher, Igmar Bergman, and Basquiat.
Has Da Vinci played a major influence in your art and do you feel we are going through a new Renaissance today?
I do believe we are going through a massive change, but not like a “return to the past rejuvenation” as the word “Renaissance” evokes. This is an epoch of new medium but with same terrain as the past. I have chosen a theme that inherently bothers me and fascinates at the same time; that being the question of an autonomous subject in an increasing tech/virtual culture and a serious ratcheting up of a control society. We are at the precipice of not being made in the image of God, but in the future image of man. I paint as a way to study our ever-warping and protean definition of who we are. Much like DaVinci’s studies in anatomy, I open up the human but in a different, more metaphorical way.
How do you create the illusion of motion in your work and do you plan on venturing into motion art?
I do not have any plans to move into moving pictures, although I did have a brief stint in movie writing as a young chap. I find it much more rewarding and difficult to capture what I set to speak about in a single image. An “all in one” idea of an archaeological history dig in one painting. All the history of making this picture is either seen or hidden, it can also come to emblemize an entire community, era, epoch, and time/space.
Has social media had an impact on your approach to art?
I agree with most that in the technology boom, social networks have been arguably one of the most impactful and freeing on everyday life and equally hostile with the idea of the human subject as seen through the Enlightenment concept. I also believe an ever-presence of technology can and will birth an architecture of control. A control society that leverages the power of technology for its control needs. This mitigates the autonomy of the contemporary subject. Another theme I attack: Are we autonomous/free in our contemporary world? I am not an alarmist when tackling these concerns, but I always want the decisions we make within this system of technology to be ours, and free.
Your work resonates to today’s technology, and social media driven culture — do you follow and stay on top of trends? Is there anything about technology that scares you?
It’s more of an affirmation rather than a fear — an affirmation that technology is always already inside the subject today. In my paintings this technology infects the subject, moving seamlessly through the body, warping and displacing the integrity of its form. I also see the glitch aesthetic as a happy failure, to which I mean this glitch or fallibility in the system breaks open a rainbow of acid color. It’s quite beautiful. This fallibility in technology will ultimately manifest itself in the human form with each encroaching technological breakthrough.
How do you see the current art scene and is there anything you would like to change or see happen in the near future? I would like to see the 80% rate of “blue chip” artists not come from Ivy League schools, I would like to see a more meritocracy style mobility, and less clique-like culture.
What are your currently working on?
My solo show with Unix Gallery NYC, in September.
INSTAGRAM: @JBOWER23
WEB: JUSTINBOWER.COM