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, Josiah Gagosian’s 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, his work is a tool for self-examination and psycho-spiritual development. His current trajectory was born out of a yearning to reconcile the complex fragments of his own unusual life and family history, placing them within a more universal historic and mythic context. He views this task as a mystical one, a divine, even futile, attempt to make work that serves as a vehicle to the other shore of human consciousness. Josiah 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. He completed his B.A. 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 development of a sense of identity that is profoundly concerned with the human and natural environments he inhabits and impacts. He completed his MFA at University of New Orleans in 2020.
