THE FORCE OF OTHER
JK5’s “The Force of Other” features work that has been brought to life in all new magnitude, in physical scale, motion, and energy as he continues to explore his obsession with reimagined writing systems. Recent work brought him back to his favorite life changing book from his childhood, Subway Art by photographers Henry Chalfant & Martha Cooper. The first portrait of futura inspired him to revisit his love of graffiti, but incorporate a wholly new narrative and storytelling approach. The painting moves all of his own writing and letterforms into new dimensions through an intuitive burst and attack, stream of consciousness, reactive process. His work is a meticulously crafted sequence that moves from sketchbooks into paintings that are transcriptions of words, autobiographical personal processes, sentiments, lists, phrases, authors, and book titles.
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“When I read about George Lucas making the original Star Wars, originally The Force was called, "The Force of Others," and that meant alot to me when I read it: the idea that you gain this kind of spiritual energy from your connection to other people."
-Chris Weitz
I discovered that quote while researching some other aspects of Star Wars mythology for my kids, now 14 & 10, and it hit me that I have always felt this spiritual energy from being connected to others; Especially after what we all lived through in our shared, collective experience with the pandemic. I had stepped away from tattooing after 25 years, right before lockdown in march 2020, and two Topps baseball card projects kept me focused and busy for the next 2 years, and enabled me to develop whole new systems and styles of storytelling portraiture, that coalesced a lifetime of cultivated approaches to drawing, writing, and designing.
The work in this show began in early September 2022, after I moved into a new, spacious gift of a studio situation; my 1st separate studio in the 20 years I've lived in Brooklyn. Once in the new studio, I chose as my 1st artist portrait, my biggest inspiration from that seminal,1984 book "Subway Art" that i got for Christmas in 1984 when i was 14: The artist then known as Futura 2000, now just Futura, or Leonard Hilton McGurr, or as I call my friend for many years now, Lenny. This portrait led to a favorite page in that book, and a few, select other Downtown, New York City, iconic artists that have had a profound effect on me.
The paintings continue evolving my obsessed passion for reimagining systems of writing, and transcribing language in my own personal ways. There's a whole new, cumulative, graffiti inspired approach to materials now. A scale that allows me to stretch out with new physicality and unbridled energy, speed, movement. Iconography, full lists, words, phrases, alliteration, rhyming, author quotes, lyrics, band names, friends names, personal processes and sentiments; all find their way onto canvas as translations from my working sketchbooks in ways I’ve been dreaming about working for a long time. I think of each moment of making as incantation...
The show's title, "The Force of Other," has many facets and angles of meaning and metaphor, like all the things I choose to make work about. The Force, while a Star Wars allusion, speaks to the power of love, loss, the unprocessable grief, fear, care, and the emotional currents that unify and inspire us to grow deeper within ourselves, ever more empathic, and intentional, as the last few years provided in unique ways for us all. Other speaks to unseen dimensions, Other worlds, Other energy fields and frequencies to tap into, absorb , translate, and channel. Other, other people, finding the Other voice, that is one's own.
Other, as in unlike others, as in, just who they are as themselves: as words, forms, feelings, objects, identities...Force, as in, pulling from all others that inspire and educate, and all Forces and Other sources of information, and the light of that transference in one's own time and occupied space. I aspire to live inside that moment, marking tools of choice in hand from heart, intuitive, live and direct. creating in ways where the thinking and action align.
I reflect on a favorite word of mine, Nonspatiotemporal, which is in a few of the paintings, means outside of space and time. Inside that outside, is the place to be for me, and where I want the work to provide transportation to.
Joseph Ari Aloi AKA JK5