joshua chamber

we forget and continue

by Joshua Chambers
MEDIUM Acrylic on wood panel

We use stories to define us. To better understand ourselves, sometimes we appropriate stories from a wider social sphere folding their arch and moral into our own narrative. In doing so we use those stories to better understand ourselves by drawing parallels between ourselves and the characters of the story. We discover conflicts and find likenesses with the literary or religious traditions that often use parabolic characters and their symbolic actions to explore the process of being human. I create images that begin from an autobiographical point and morph into scenes in which characters and objects of broad cultural references interact within cryptic tableaus activated by fragments of text. When approaching the work the viewer has to pour a part of themselves into the story to inform the narrative within each scene and define each character’s agency and circumstances.