Ulterior Motion 2009
While seated aboard a flight, I was fascinated by the landscape from my view inside the airplane cabin. The alien stretch of land left me considering how a simple change in elevation could transform the way I construct my understanding of space.
Artist Statement
While seated aboard a return flight from Seattle, I found myself fascinated by the landscape from my view inside the airplane cabin. Particularly, the alien stretch of land during my descent over Dallas Fort Worth left me considering how a simple change in elevation could transform the way I constructed my understanding of space. My changing view of the remote landscape from the aircraft brought me to think about the elasticity and usability of our sources of information and the way they have shifted and displaced our orientation. The experience of the remote has increased within my lifetime, and with it has come a building awareness of simultaneous events, chronologies, and relationships. It has generated a dislocated but interesting connection to ideas, people, and events that I had a distant view of, and perhaps only a glimpse into. This work is a meditation on that distance.
Josh Tonies lives and works in Braddock, PA. His current work explores transient structures. Mining systematic imagery such as technical illustration, security patterns from envelopes and architectural diagrams, he reconfigures these depictions of space into slippery windows. He has exhibited his work nationally at Mass MoCa, Light Industry in Brooklyn and internationally at Meinblau e.V in Berlin.