Co.Lab Gallery presents

Josh Hill

ABSURDITY

OPENING PARTY THURSDAY JANUARY 12TH, 2023 7-10PM

EXHIBITION CLOSES JANUARY 25TH

Josh Hill was born in Thunder Bay but has lived all over Canada and a bit in Romania growing up. He is a self taught visual artist and a professional tattoo artist. Having participated in the Inktober challenge every year since 2016, Hill has found drawing to be an important part of his everyday life. His inspirations reach between the Surrealism of Dali and Bosch to the concepts of philosophers Kierkegaard and Camus. These inspirations work together to inform his work in  creating a diversion from the expected. He keeps his concepts unconventional, sticking to absurdism, with a confrontation of Nihilism at its core. 

“Absurdism is about life and existence. The idea that there is no meaning to it all, with an understanding that, that's fine.

These works have no inherent meaning; they are all dots organized in a way to look like familiar things in an arrangement that is surreal. 

I assume by looking at the work we could utilize all sorts of cultural concepts to string together a meaning and maybe the observations made coincide from person to person, but they may be vastly different. 

Our brains are meaning-making machines; they will search for valuable bits of information and confirm the useful parts and disregard the less useful parts. The brain will determine the value of an object and the object will be brought to light or cast into the bin. 

This isn't a destruction of meaning or values, this is a celebration of the power of our minds. To create meaning where there isn't any. “