Joshua Petker / Some Hippies and a Hobo @ ASHES/ASHES, Los Angeles

Jesters, vagabonds, sailors at port, historical bohemians, Greek cynics, and common outsider intellectuals inhabit the role of the subject in Petker’s work – listless seekers as, and among, tropes of painting. His subjects and painting processes represent an attempt at making sense of one’s existence through idealism while also repeating the material routines of daily life. Central to his practice is a common ground between the activities of unmoored searching and structured patterning. Petker enacts Freud’s notion of life as a phenomenon of repetition by painting the same flower patterns in the hopes of achieving personal peace in the process. Other bumper sticker philosophies rub elbows with Fauvism and Pop art historical influences. The motifs in Petker’s paintings become mantras anchored by his position of positionlessness.