Josh Keyes Illustrator

Josh Keyes is an American con­tem­po­rary artist who works with paint­ing, draw­ing, and instal­la­tion art. He cur­rently works out of Oakland, California. His work has been described as “a satir­i­cal look at the impact urban sprawl has on the envi­ron­ment and sur­mises, with the aid of sci­en­tific slices and core sam­ples, what could hap­pen if we con­tinue to infil­trate and encroach on our rural surroundings.”

Josh’s work brings to mind the detail and com­plex­ity of nat­ural his­tory dio­ra­mas, and the color and dia­gram­matic com­plex­ity one might find in cross sec­tion illus­tra­tions from a vin­tage sci­ence text­book. His work has devel­oped over the past years into an iconic and com­plex per­sonal vocab­u­lary of imagery that cre­ates a mys­te­ri­ous and some­times unset­tling jux­ta­po­si­tion between the nat­ural world and the man made landscape.

The work con­veys an anx­ious vision of what the world might be like in the future as a result of cur­rent global warm­ing pre­dic­tions. Keyes’ inter­est in cre­at­ing paint­ings that fuse real­ism with the pos­si­ble often evokes the imagery found in dystopian and post-apocalyptic lit­er­a­ture, while other works express the opti­mism and utopian ideas found in the writ­ings of Buckminster Fuller and Paolo Soleri. Keyes often incor­po­rates objects and ani­mals into his dis­sected envi­ron­ments that have per­sonal icono­graphic significance.

He weaves his per­sonal mythol­ogy through frac­tured and iso­lated land­scapes that are either over­grown with veg­e­ta­tion or under­wa­ter, and often depict his­toric or mil­i­tary mon­u­ments cov­ered with graf­fiti. The imagery func­tions as a way for Keyes to express his per­sonal expe­ri­ence and also allows him to com­ment and inter­pret events in the world. His work has been fea­tured in numer­ous pub­li­ca­tions and exhib­ited in gal­leries in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Denver. Keyes cur­rently lives and works in Portland Oregon.

www.joshkeyes.net