Joe Biel

I am most interested in charged human situations. This interest is reflected through various means in particular works; sometimes by portraying a particular moment or event, but more often by showing the moment before or after an action which is not named or specified. I’m more interested in the suggestion of narrative possibilities than in clearly resolved linear narratives, though it seems important that certain details (i.e. gestures, expressions, clothing, object types) remain quite specific. For me it is in the possibility of the more general metaphor meeting the peculiarly specific, that images start to realize a greater, more layered potential.

Specific visual components come into my work from a variety of sources and processes. There is a constant shifting between the imagined and the observed. Often these are combined. Much of my work is a result of a collision of differing qualities: stoicism and vulnerability, absurd comedy and overwrought tragedy, the banal and the bizarre. It is my hope that these combinations move away from simply read structures in favor of more multifaceted constructions which begin to speak of the strange complexity of existence. (Joe Biel, 2006)