August 16 - October 13, 2023
Carlos Gallery
Josiah Golson explores personal and collective narratives of identity and advocacy through drawing, painting, poetry, performance, and video. He is the creator of 800 Collective, an organization that creatively inspires and organizes civic discourse and engagement. FESTIVAL is a work of poetry, installation, and performance through which Golson explores identity and belonging in his relationship with popular music and its imagery. Through visual and textual narrative contextualized in the space of a teenage music lover's bedroom, Golson shares his experience of negotiating the complexity of influence and seeking authenticity amid the power structures of popular culture. In FESTIVAL, Golson reimagines his teenage bedroom as a space of world-building with the iconography of popular music. Through the assemblage and collage of photos sourced from magazines, posters, and pop music media, he designs “stages” or scenes inspired by the “genre” or styles of music associated with the subjects. Over time, Golson revisits, reconstructs, and removes images to transform the layered and evolving scene, as the bedroom endures as a space for conjuring and constructing identity and community. As he releases the mass-produced images of his “heroes,” these icons populate the floor and are replaced with photos, markings, and materials that reflect his authentic experiences and world, the music no less present. The installation is documented in an Artist’s Book that contains poems for each of the 12 “stages” of the bedroom. More of Golson’s work can be viewed online at Josiahgolson.com and on Instagram @josiahgolson