spotlight
All False Witnesses: josiah lloyd
by Halee Sommer
Doomsday Clock, oil on canvas
Installation photo featuring the artist in front of On the Beach (right), acrylic, ink on PVC panel
Josiah Lloyd paints imagery that simultaneously reveals the knowns tape, paint, and moments of ink. “Each of the paintings contains a
and the unknowns of our society. I was fortunate to meet Lloyd at the history of marks,” he says, noting that some of his most recent works
opening of his most recent exhibition All False Witnesses at DBHOM have been in progress since 2012.
Gallery in Gainesville, Florida.
Lloyd’s paintings begin from a photograph—specifi cally, from a dis-
Lloyd has been working in his studio at DBHOM (short for DNA By carded analog image. He then paints directly onto the found photo,
the Hand of Man) for about six months, creating his own residency in scans the image, and enlarges it into a transfer image. He then contin-
an open, spacious room on the second fl oor of the gallery. DBHOM ues this process of painting, scanning, and transferring the image until
began in February 2016 by Gerard Bencen, a Patent-Arts lawyer, in he arrives at the scale he desires.
order to provide Gainesville with a gallery space that can also serve as
a space for artist studios. Lloyd showed me rooms that would prove to “The entire process is subtractive,” says Lloyd, “Rather than what we
be wonderful spaces for fi gure drawing, as well as a kitchen, which he think about painting as being an additive process.” His use of tape
hopes may become a cafe in the future. Together, Lloyd and Bencen allows him to isolate certain qualities of the original image, stripping
are working to make DBHOM Gallery a creative and multi-functional away layers of paint to fi nd the fi nal image.
space for Gainesville creatives to enjoy.
His ultimate goal is to, “make marks into images and images into
All False Witnesses is comprised of Lloyd’s newest series. “It’s a body marks,” creating transformational imagery that fl irts between the
of work being developed as its being created,” he explains. The exhibi- realms of photography, printmaking, and foremost, painting. His inno-
tion spanned two rooms on the fi rst fl oor, fi lling the space with Lloyd’s vative technique works almost in a backwards process, and results in
paintings, which range from four inches to nearly six feet in height. a completely refreshing body of work. The multi-layered process Lloyd
The impressive array of scale and subject matter takes the viewer on employs allows the viewers to experience his works both in terms of
a visceral journey, bringing the imagination to a new space and time composition and subject, as well as through his history of marks.
with each work.
“The ultimate accomplishment,” says Lloyd, “comes if you could look
at the fi rst gestural mark that I made and the last mark that I made all
in one eye-shot.”
Looking at his paintings, you feel that invisible thread he is describing,
experiencing the liminal world he has created through stretches of
47
Photos by Halee Sommer
You can see more at:
@josiahllwyd
facebook.com/DBHOM
www. ARTBORNEMAGAZINE.com