Josh Juett is an artist living and working in Tarntanya, Adelaide.
Working primarily as a painter, Juett explores relational dynamics and self-inquiry. Drawn to sombre Dutch still life paintings of the 1600s, Juett’s own exacting and technically precise paintings excavate his childhood recollections. While folding references to popular culture cartoons, toys and video game into playful and surreal compositions, ideologically Juett’s work stems from an uncomfortable awareness of his own thought processes. Many of the finely wrought, vividly realised paintings are illustrative of an internal monologue, with beloved cartoon characters and prized objects from the artist’s own collection serving as avatars. Much like the wunderkammers of seventeenth century Dutch collectors, Juett’s pictorial accumulation of objects becomes a means of self-expression; a way of understanding the world and describing one’s own identity through gathering and display.
Juett’s exhibitions are complex, densely allusive thickets of symbols and coded meanings; they invite you to ruminate. Juett invokes a cryptic personal symbology that is by turns irreverent and affecting in its allusion to the transience of life. Turning his work over in your mind and teasing out its interwoven threads is one of the principal pleasures of the experience Juett offers.