Statement: By necessity, not choice, I am an American bricoleur, a shaper of whatever comes my way. I make art because it’s fun to play with people’s heads, to push back against yet hopefully leave a lesson for a world which mostly ignores my existence. I make artworks in metallic and fluorescent acrylics and industrial plastics because it’s even more fun to have people realize I am playing with them and then want it to continue, and these are the best tools to those ends. What magician doesn’t want a willing, incredulous audience and a stage conducive to transformation? Along the way, I take mostly disregarded industrial materials and elevate them into works which demand attention on their own terms. The goal is the substantiation of imagination: fooling the eye into seeing things it never imagined could exist, and then going beyond to ask for willing participation in a different way of seeing the world around us, externally and internally.

Bio: Josh Stein (b. 1973, United States; currently residing in Napa, California) is a lifelong multi-mode creative artist, musician, writer, professor with multiple advanced degrees from the University of California and the University of Liverpool, adult beverage maker, and current MFA candidate at School of Visual Arts in New York City. His artwork has been nationally and internationally published numerous times and exhibited in a wide range of locations around the world, including the Pop and Contemporary Art Museum in Tallinn, Estonia; the CICA Museum in Seoul, Korea; Adas Israel in Washington DC; Burning Man in Blackrock, Nevada; and Gallery 1064 in Seattle, amongst many others. His 2D work in metallic and fluorescent acrylics and 3D projects in industrial plastics bring his influences of Pop art, Tattoo flash and lining techniques, and Abstract Surrealism and Expressionism to the extreme edge where graphic design and calligraphy meet the Platonic theory of forms.