This exhibition, Bo Joseph's fourth with the gallery, takes its title from the primary series of works on paper in the exhibition, Holding Spaces. In this new series, Joseph transcribes, abstracts, and merges imagery from photographs of interiors he appropriated from online sources, many of which depict collections of tribal art or decor that leverages the energy and aesthetic of tribal art, whether authentic ritual objects or “fakes” made specifically for trade. Some of these sourced images capture celebrated collections such as those of Helena Rubinstein, Peggy Guggenheim, and Wifredo Lam. The term “holding space” can be read as both an action and a place: a method of reserving and cordoning off a safe space for emotions and ideas, and a location in which things are admired, coveted, secured, or detained. Joseph states, “since much of the imagery in my work is of cultural objects that have come into purview because of societal friction points, conflict, and outright plunder throughout history, and many of those objects are “held” in public and private collections, I adapted the term as a means of opening discussion and conflict resolution around issues of cultural appropriation, authorship, artistic autonomy, and visual sovereignty.” 

These dense and colorful oil pastel, tempera, and acrylic works on paper are distinguished by a complex and labor-intensive process. Joseph deconstructs the appropriated imagery by transcribing and layering simplified line drawings onto a patchwork of multiple sheets of paper. These sheets are then subjected to a barrage of chancy techniques like coating, scraping, and rinsing, before they are reassembled. The result is an anomalous, tattered yet enriched translation of what began as a simplistic "wireframe" image. Joseph then establishes spatial and compositional hierarchies and densities by filling in negative spaces with radiating lines and edging various networks and clusters of forms with halos of colors. Thus, Joseph visually strips cultural icons of their normal reference points, reining in relationships between parts rather than the parts themselves: here, he points to the way fragments and “absences” define each other and the spaces between them.

In the work Catching Ghosts: Arbitrator of Absents, Joseph revisits his series of wall reliefs that decontextualize similar source material into objects that feel aged, auratic, totemic. These graphic sculptures, in a technique developed by the artist, achieve their rich patina from casein, a medium made with milk protein with 11th-century origins. Joseph cites Louise Bourgeois and Joseph Beuys as profound influences not only on form and color choices, but also on the use of recontextualization to extract the charge from found sources.

Joseph makes no claim of knowing how an issue as large as colonialism and its socio-political inheritances may or may not, one day, be resolved. But as a maker who admires and respects ritual objects and cultural production outside of his own, a position not uncommon to artists everywhere, his earnest charge into the fray of potentially hazardous conceptual wander is an attempt to usurp the usurper, giving voice to the many issues that lie at the heart of a complex world created by our forebears. Joseph acknowledges the legacies with which we must grapple but declines to perpetuate the violence they have unleashed for too long. The result leads to a reading of the work that is colorful, nuanced, urgent.