A Stress-Free Point of View
I wonder about the disconnect between my life as I experience it and my life as I imagine it. I wonder about the difference between our world in actuality and our world as we imagine it together (possibility). In A Stress-Free Point of View, I wonder about the power of images accumulated throughout history to infect the meaning of one’s life. I use my life as an example through which to understand and come to peace with this unredeemable system – a turbulent sea of images constantly (and arbitrarily) regulating how we build our conceptions of the world through our imaginings. Images surround us and influence our individual and collective imaginations. Images claim for their subject territory in the imagination of the viewer. Claims can have many purposes – whether to solidify state power or sway my mother’s buying habits – but each claim employs the same subtle mode of regulating our imaginations. Claims might be disguised as other claims or might not look anything like claims at all. We have always imagined about images and their claims because, and especially during our time of an accelerating global network of images, they have constantly bombarded us (looming stone, icon, royal portrait, Instagram…among other lineages). Do you also feel anxious reconciling your experience in the world with your imagining of the world? And doing so according to the mysterious claims made by never-ending onslaughts of images? I find it relaxing to make images because, wandering through them, I can try to recognize their power to amplify, filter, and suppress how I imagine the world. Among my images I come to recognize and value the disconnect between the actual world built up of competing claims and the fresh, possible world of my imagination, easing the anxiety of trying to know things as I imagine them. I am always hoping to uncover a more faithful picture of myself and my world fashioned by the wild ambiguity of photographs – I am always hoping to offer a stress-free point of view.
A Stress-Free Point of View, 2019
Joshua Tarplin (American) collaborates with photographic technology to understand what images are and how images influence humans in using our imagination to build our conception of ourselves and our collectively imagined world. His anxiety stems from the contingency and arbitrary nature of these influences, progressively accumulated like lost codes throughout eons of history. In our time of an accelerating global network of images he works to provide a stress-free point of view of the mysterious claims images make of us (often by reinterpreting possibility within a queer perspective). Josh holds degrees in Art and the History of Art from Yale University, has exhibited nationally and internationally.