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My name is Joseph Ayers.  I am an artist, educator, and curator.  These three practices continually inform my ideas and work, and I am humbly, forever thankful to the artists, students and teachers whom I've worked with.  Much of my personal inspiration wells from growing up in rural Gulf Coast Florida working as the son of a shrimper and handyman, and also from my experiences serving as an Electrical Lineman in the United States Air Force while I was stationed in Alaska throughout the 1990s.  Following my enlisted service, I began to study Fine Art at the University of New Orleans with a focus in digital media, and afterward pursued a Masters of Fine Art from Hunter College City University of New York with a focus in Combined Media.   As an MFA student I began making connections with my past through art making, and naturally focused on relationships I witnessed between the rapidly changing landscape, and a modern renaissance of new technologies. After Graduate School I began my teaching career, developing classes that fused together contemporary theory, analog, hands-on art making, and digital tools and techniques in compositing, video and animation.  I currently live and work in the Hudson Valley of New York with my artist family, and teach interdisciplinary courses at Parsons School of Design.

 

As a multi-media artist I think about appearances and perceptions, and how relationships between these two things shape everything we experience.  I am interested in the ways that new technologies and the expanded montage of contemporary data consumption have evolved into a new authority on a global scale.  We are experiencing a dramatic transition that fundamentally alters the way we perceive and experience objects, space and time. It is a milieu marked by the collapse of past paradigms, and the rise of a future that is imperceptible.  

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Drawing on my personal past experiences and impressions, I use both traditional media and new technologies to explore relationships between seemingly disparate subjects.  The work often leads to abstracted personal narratives that reflect on the changing landscape, as well as how technology is reshaping the social, aesthetic and political landscapes. I feel a strong connection to the Dada and Surrealist artists of the turn of the century, and their impulse to raise questions about conventions, challenge perceptions, oppose oppressive regimes, and expand the borders of art, is at the core of my practice.