Joshua Hogan was born in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and received his BA from Carlow College (now Carlow University). While at Carlow, he began a series of paintings inspired by his participation in the program, Semester at Sea. This journey to 15 countries, including Egypt, Vietnam, Turkey and Morocco, laid the foundation for the fluid shapes he creates today; a way to visually communicate his own interactions with people as well as the interactions he observes between people.

With a reality most akin to the Surrealists, Hogan’s painted shapes are a complex web of random exchanges that lie in the unconscious and its disruptive disconnection of signified relations. His paintings are an allegory for the interactions he experiences and the relationships between people in his own personal story. The act of painting requires the letting go of perceived memory in exchange for the opportunity to see something new. Painting is how he interprets the stories running through his mind that affect, form, and reshape his own sense-of-self. Some paintings begin with a personal feeling of disappointment but find resolution as the interaction of shapes find a sense of purpose. In other paintings, Hogan’s shapes can’t find resolution. Patterns interfere and cause delay in the ability to get attention or gain acceptance. The atmospheric shifts of color in his paintings introduce a new spectrum to the visible world and describe what it might look like to see through this world. Hogan embraces the fact that interactions between us are now also defined by the meeting of our projected selves. Although, it is often a troubling experience, he attempts to imagine and capture what it just might look like in this internet of things, all-at-once luminous space and data-space.