Artist: Bri Joy
Exhibition: Printmaking. Fine Art
Media: Ink on bfk paper
Gallery: CSULB School of Art, Gatov Gallery East
Website: none
Instagram: Bri.Joy
Bri Joy was born and raised in Magesca, a small town in the Santa Ana mountains and has always been in touch with nature. Her hometown has no cell phone service and is in the midst of a forest, so
she enjoys the natural environment and wildlife but decided to come to Long Beach after high school. She chose the major printmaking because she took a class in high school and fell in love with the process. After this semester, she will be done with her undergrad and doesn’t plan on going to graduate school. Once she graduates, she intends on teaching printmaking at a college level. She is a student in the School of Arts’ Printmaking program. Due to her involvement with extreme rural and urban areas, her work is a combination of organic and digital lines.
All of her pieces were moderately sized posters with horizontal or vertical lines that created an image. Most of the images were random abstractions but some were of organic items (usually humans), and she varies the space between each line in order to manipulate the image or design expressed. She uses various types of ink and puts design on a screen then presses it onto a print board to get her design. The nature of her line is organic or digital and she uses jagged and smooth shapes because she intends for her work to jump, move around, and exist. Bri’s intention is to create value by manipulating eyes and wants a conversation between the entire piece. Each piece was about 2 feet tall and 6 feet wide which allowed for an observer to change their perspective of the pieces by standing far away or close enough to see each line.
Her work doesn’t necessarily about anything, but is her creation and is simply an expression of her feelings and thoughts. She stated that she wants to merge her past and present and express her experience of moving from the most extreme rural area to an extremely urban area. All of her work has an organic aesthetic that leads me to believe she constantly thinks about her hometown. Even she said that Magesca is a
great place to raise kids, and that she may end up living there later in life. Her pieces explore the organic influence on the digital world, which explains why her work looks like manipulated computer data from the Matrix. The result of her work is due to her longing to return home to her roots in the mountains.
I personally do not enjoy being in nature, but nature itself is very beautiful and I have always been intrigued by the incorporation of both city life and remote life. When I moved from my relatively small hometown to Chicago, I experienced something similar to Bri but instead of longing to return to the wilderness, I fell in love with the city. Her work reminds me of the A Sunday on La Grande Jatte in the Art Institute of Chicago that consists of millions of tiny dots. All the tiny dots add up to create a beautiful scene of people enjoying a sunny Sunday in the park. This work can be found in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as well, and is similar to Bri Joy’s work in the sense that it incorporated a series of digital lines or marks that create an organic scene. But both, as displayed in Ferris Bueller, can change perspective due to how far away or close up you stand to the artwork.
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