Douse Your Eyes in the Green Marsh of Sleep
2021
New Orleans, Louisiana
Josiah Gagosian was born in Pocatello, Idaho and raised in Idaho and Oregon. His father is a descendant of Ottoman-Armenian converts to Mormonism, and his mother is the daughter of a devout Mexican Catholic and a lapsed Mormon of Scandinavian extraction. These disparate identities have shaped a sensibility that is both deeply religious and keenly interested in the natural world and humanity’s place in it. Gagosian completed his BA in English Literature and Painting at the University of Oregon in 2005, after which he moved to New Orleans, where the variegated culture of Carnival and the often impenetrably humid climate have fostered the growth of an artistic practice rooted in the human and natural environments he inhabits and impacts. He completed his MFA at University of New Orleans in 2020.
Joan Mitchell Center Residency, 2022
Inspired from an early age by the imagery and mythology of the Nahuas, whose pictographic writing system culminated in a conceptualization of painting that was synonymous with poetry, my current artistic practice has become rooted in the worlds of the literary and the linguistic. Deriving metaphorical motifs from a variety of disparate cultural and religious traditions, my work is a tool for self-examination and psycho-spiritual development.”