Joseph Brock

Foreign & Domestic is delighted to present Joseph Brock’s debut solo exhibition, Every Asterism, comprising twelve identically sized paintings in a horizontal format and at human scale. Clear acrylic medium is layered and sanded to create a panel-like substrate on canvas. Brock works into these surfaces with acrylic paints, graphite, color pencils and oil, to generate his hybrid and allusive abstractions. Brock’s paintings function like windows, screens and mirrors, imbibing, circulating and emanating light.

Asterisms are recognizable patterns of stars, ad hoc visual classifications of the sky into geometric shapes, forming triangles, squares, diamonds, crosses, or a teapot, even. Brock’s paintings channel a diverse range of visual influences: science fiction, Byzantine icons, anime, early Renaissance religious painting, devotional sculpture, the electronic miscellany of loading screens and landing pages, and defunct design languages of the recent past such as ‘Y2K’ or ‘Utopian Scholastic’.

Like in music – Joseph Brock is a trained double bassist – each painting is a search for a phrase, a string of information with stable internal logic, to form the basis for future iterations in a relentless exploration of information space. Solving for the path, like machine learning or mycelium, sending out nascent threads and reinforcing the branches that minimize loss or maximize nutrition. Each painting is an algorithm for compressing memories, core, fleeting, or imagined, and storing the information spatially, like microchips, tree rings or star patterns in the night sky.

Every Asterism speaks of lineage and generation. Lineage in a musical education, from teacher to teacher to student. The lineages connecting paintings within a single exhibition, a wider oeuvre, or an entire tradition. The lineage within a family; the boundary between history and the individual, between the pasts and the present.

Every Asterism is accompanied by several texts: ‘Sunlight hits’ by Douglas Ross; an interview of Joseph Brock’s parents, Joe and Shawn Brock, by Joseph Brock; ‘Gamepaths’ by Giacomo Bianchino; and a coda by Joseph Brock. We are most grateful to the writers and interviewees for their contribution.