If you consider yourself a graphic designer, you’ve probably heard of Joshua Davis. As one of the first adopters of Flash, a significant new media artist, an author, and one of the design world's weightiest members, Joshua Davis is a name that rolls off many tongues during discussions regarding progression, experimentation, and development. A pioneer in the word's most technological sense, Joshua has never been one to find a niche and stick with it, instead choosing to find what's next — or in what's often his case, to create it. We chatted with Joshua about things like Praystation, philosophy, and his plans for the future, and wound up feeling a little bit like we do when we look at one of his mathematically composed graphics. In other words: utterly enthralled.

Joshspear.com: For our readers who aren't as familiar with your background, can you give us a brief rundown of your life up until today?

Joshua Davis: My name is Joshua Davis, born 1971 in San Diego, California, moved to Littleton, Colorado where I pretty much grew up. I had always been interested in art and in high school I entered a statewide competition and took second place in the state for painting. After spending ‘89, ‘90 in Huntington Beach, California skateboarding and ‘91, ‘92 moving back to Colorado living in Frisco to do some snowboarding, I moved to New York in November 1992 and eventually attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. At Pratt I worked on Design and Illustration and through fellow classmates got into working on the web in 1995 (Netscape 1.1). When Netscape 3 was released (at the end of 1996) I had a moment of clarity to use technology and the web to create my work. 13 years later I run Joshua Davis Studios where I use design and technology to create work for corporate clients, private collectors, galleries, museums, and personal exploration.

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Josh and I first saw Sarah Pickering’s explosive photography at Scope Miami during Art Basel last year, and I was excited to see her featured in the current pHytonics issue. It’s undeniably the pyro in me that’s drawn to Sarah’s explosion photos– haven’t been able to get one this big out of my gas grill quite yet though. Interestingly, Sarah is no pyrotechnic (because you’d think that would be half the fun), but rather just follows police and military personnel into the boonies in England to photograph their explosives tests. Sarah is represented by renowned photography gallery Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York, and just recently held a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Anyone have a chance to see that show?

I’ve just received word that Marlene Haring, the same artist that brought us the ‘Sucking Marks’ Exhibit at Scope Miami, is going to be performing ‘Secret Service‘ in New York City tomorrow. What is the ‘Secret Service Society,’ you ask? It is a meeting of fixed duration, on a given day, in a single place of an unspecified number of people. Everyone attending the meeting enters into a non-disclosure agreement which states that all transactions taking place during the Secret Service Society shall not be disclosed in any way to anyone else who has not been part of that Secret Service Society. On entering the agreement the Secret Service Society member is given a secret sign which will identify all the members of that particular Secret Service Society. God only know what Ms. Haring has in store for you all this time; but if it’s anything like Sucking Marks, you’re in for a treat! So if you’re in NYC tomorrow, from 1-8 PM, head to the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), 323 West 39th Street– take the lift to the 8th floor. And if you can’t make this event, catch up with Marlene at Scope New York.

The new year is customarily ushered in with a big lit up ball dropping in New York City and a kiss with that special someone. For many of you, that customary kiss may have not gone as planned this year. Maybe your special someone was in a different location, maybe you don’t have a special someone, or maybe you drank too much and passed out before midnight. In any case, if you had been celebrating with Marlene Haring, your new year’s kiss (well, suck really) would have been contractually guaranteed. We found Marlene at the entrance of the Scope Miami art fair about a month ago, and we were impressed with her Sucking Marks exhibit for several reasons: it was, in every sense of the word, unconventional art; it was a cheap ($10) and sanitary thrill; and Marlene creatively redefined the relationship between the artist and the art collector. Aias Vargas put it best: “Like many of Harling's works, Sucking Marks $10 engages directly not only her ‘audience' but the rules society determines for the relationship between the artist and the collector, the producer and the consumer, the body and the commodity.” See some more photos we took of the ’sucking booth’ after the jump…
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While visiting the Scope Miami show last weekend, we had the pleasure of seeing some of Austrian Lois Renner’s artistic photography. Lois tries to hurdle the limitations of media with his large format photographs, and breathes a mysterious living quality into his paintings. Lois sees the studio as a “spatial situation and as [a] starting and crystallization point of artistic action and begins his analysis with it's miniature reproduction.” The work is interesting to look at to say the least– his pieces are full of nuanced details, object size illusions (at least I thought so), and a simultaneous blending and clashing of lines that can only be explained by seeing them for yourself. My favorite is ‘Sound 101‘ pictured here on the left.

We viewed a wealth of amazing work at the Scope Miami fair over the weekend. Young Ryan Carr Johnson’s paintings were at the top of the heap for me. From what I can deduce, Ryan layers paint onto plywood and then refines the living daylights out of it with a hand sanding process. The result is awe-inspiring to see in person, because the art has such depth and structure to it– regrettably, I can only bring to you, our beloved readers, two-dimenstional images of Ryan’s work. The images I have included here are phases 2 and 4 of the piece entitled ‘Blotter Acid.’ Ryan’s work was shown as part of the gogo art projects initiative, which is Connor Contemporary Art’s attempt to incubate emerging and experimental art; it evolved from CCA’s annual Academy Exhibition of recent BFA/MFA grads from the Baltimore and Washington D.C. area–and appears to be a great program.

We had an opportunity to check out an amazing new media installation by Isreal born, San Francsico dwelling Shirley Shor yesterday at Scope Miami. She’s part of an emerging generation of new-media artists who are redefining how computers can be utilized as vehicles for artistic production. The piece we saw and immensely enjoyed playing with was called Terra Infirma– a platform filled with smooth white sand mountains, and a projector hanging high above sending down a real time animation of colored lines. It created what looked like gridlines or some kind of landscaped topographical maps. She says, “these landscapes are a synthesis between the code and the territory.” Her work has been described as “liquid architecture”, generating art on-the-fly with computer code. Check out her video explanation here.

We experienced a lot of great emerging art at Scope Miami, but there were several artists that stood out of the crowd. One of them was Neasden Control Centre, a mysterious ‘Willy Wonka’ type who covertly moves between the UK and Spain. He’s been around for a while, and has become a coveted resource for installations and movie/animation projects by companies like MTV, VH1, and Adidas. His work was exhibited by Galerie Heliumcowboy Artspace based in Hamburg Germany, alongside other great work from artists like Boris Hoppek and Friends With You. I love the way Neasden Control Centre uses mixed materials to create work that literally jumps out of the wall at you.

Yesterday we cruised over to the Wynwood Art District (that’s the fancy title for what sure looked like Miami’s ghetto) to check out Scope Miami in Roberto Clemente Park. From the very beginning, we knew we were in for a treat. A huge tent set-up housed a wide — and I mean WIDE — variety of emerging contemporary art shown by a plethora of exhibitors from all over the world. This is Scope’s 5th year in Miami, and it’s heralded as Miami’s first alternative art fair, upholding a tradition of one-person and thematic group shows presented alongside museum-quality programming, collector tours, screenings, and other special events. All of our senses were definitely peaked as we strode through the aisles of Scope. Check out more photos of our favorite pieces after the jump.
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