Joe Turpin's work with the expanding image and exploration of elements through the mixed media art.
About Joe's Mixed Media Work:
This series of works has been painted in conversation with each other and use similar points of departure, being current or previous affairs/news events, artists and intertextuality with other artworks, semiotics and methodologies. It continues practice seeking to unveil these methodologies and analyses of Johannesburg in relation to the artist’s own ‘position’, in a more ‘quilted’ manner of painting and mixed media. This work illustrates, though found objects, the continuous manner of exploration in introducing elements of sculpture and text to expand the artist’s practice and that of painting (a recent development in Turpin’s emerging practice which he sees as a very necessary and exciting step). The works use semiotics, reflected by song lyrics, various sources of inspiration or the streams of life in popular culture and modernity, as well as repetition, to convey or deplete meanings and knowledge. It is always going to be political with the socio-economic, historical and even artistic landscape in Johannesburg and South Africa in general. In the past, Turpin has made work that is very political and confrontational, and then experimented on how to get away from that, but that work which was more ‘fun’ inherently became political in it’s attempt to get away from it. Turpin is temporally trying to embrace it, and navigate it. Essentially it is a kind of map of the metropolitan nature of daily visual culture production and conditioning in Johannesburg. The same process is followed anywhere in the world Turpin may be invited to create artworks, and it is always complemented by various methods of research in practice including reading and watching a lot of source material. Each work, however many parts, is a culmination of sorts. It is this culmination, which forms Joe Turpin’s visual language.
About the Artist:
Joe Turpin is a South African, Johannesburg based visual-artist. Born in 1995 in the suburb of Yeoville, having studied in the United Kingdom and South Africa respectively, he currently lives and practices in Johannesburg. Turpin studied Fine Arts for one year at Oxford Brookes School of Art in the United Kingdom, and is pursuing his BA Fine Art (hons) at Wits School of Art in Johannesburg. Turpin is Jewish and comes from an artistic background. His mother, Giséle Wulfsohn was a photographer and twin brother a musician. As part of the art scene, where various disciplines coexist in Johannesburg, Turpin had dabbled in fashion and modeled for a few lookbooks as well as walking for SA Fashion Week (Spring Summer 2017), however it is away from the camera in the confines of the studio where his passion unfolds. Turpin is currently independent of any formal representation, and has had exhibitions and festival shows in a variety of countries around the world as well as received press both online and in various publications.
Artist Media Links:
Online Portfolio: www.joeturpinart.tumblr.com
Facebook: ArtJoeTurpin
Instagram: @joegturpin