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My Paintings Explore How The Photograph Functions As Cultural Memory.

Painting in a photorealistic manner, using the four colors of a commercial printing, Joshua Dean draws from social media and the culture after the information age to paint like a human printer. His work investigates how photography, or the jpegs we all have, substitutes for cultural memory.

Highlighting media driven advertisements, home movies and the history of photography as themes, he hopes to expand on a sense of technical awareness.

Hailing from a small, Midwestern town, he learned the skill of escapism early. The pursuit led to a world within comic books. From this he developed interests in the figure and its place in the history of painting. He obtained an MFA from the New York Academy of Art.

Drawing from Pop Art influences, the young painter developed an appreciation for social commentary. Seeing the significance of both traditional and postmodern painting, he devised a plan to join the two by taking the techniques of Master painters and reinterpreting them.

The process reinterprets traditional painting as if he were a printer. He uses four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Layered transparently on top of each other, the finished work mimics the oscillated output of an ink jet printer.