Joshua Mosley, Donald Young Gallery, Chicago IL. Sept. 17-Nov. 5, 2004
Michelle Grabner, ArtUS magazine, January-Febuary, 2005

George Washington Carver dedicated his life to expanding the agricultural economy of the South. Most widely recognized and credited for inventing peanut butter, Carver's research into peanut and sweet potato products liberated the South from its dependence on cotton as its primary agricultural crop. A bronze statue of George Washington Carver, standing proudly with his shoulders thrown back and cradling a weight in his hands that was once used to measure cotton bails, is the iconic centerpiece of Joshua Mosley's exhibition at the Donald Young Gallery. Yet the conceptual impetus of Mosley's show is not as simple as commemorating an American folk hero. Mosley plays with the language of Social Realism, exploring the virtues and ethics of commitment to work and the dedication to social betterment. But his complex stories and their sculptural props also lament the human cost associated with service and duty. His parable-like narratives both applaud and deplore a life committed to excellence, self-sufficiency, and traditional values.

A Vue {2004), Mosley's high-definition, mixed-media video production employing stop-motion puppets and ink wash drawings, is projected in one gallery while George Washington Carver, 150 ft. {2004), the 24-inch bronze monument, stands austere and singular on a pedestal in the middle of its own adjacent gallery. As an iconic sculpture, the Carver figure conveys all the folksy realism that traditional honorary statuary requires. It also plays a major role in the video where it is a 15O-foot sculpture in the town square of Diamond, Missouri.

The video unfolds in a small town where a middle-aged park ranger named Henry has the job of keeping the enormous monument spick and span. Sporting a thick moustache and climbing gear, Henry scales the towering figure daily, keeping it polished and presentable for the innocuous Middle American town sprawled out around the statue's feet Henry and the rest of the town's population are polite and helpful, a community where everyone knows their neighbor. These characters behave with the same aw-shucks, simpler-time mentality that characterized Sheriff Andy Taylor and the crew of Mayberry, USA. .But Mosley's tale takes place in a contemporary town where a fiber optic company challenges the community's traditional values.

Henry meets Susan, an employee who works for this communication company in Diamond before being transferred to a different company location. She articulates today's business philosophy by telling Henry, "Location is less important as regulation becomes more national." Contradicting the capitalist mantra with a personal desire, she then adds, "But I really hope to settle." Susan then departs on an airplane and the video ends. The characters in Mosley's video communicate simply and talk without voice inflection. The original musical score. written in collaboration with composer Abby Schneider, is thought-provoking, underscoring an overall seriousness to the complicated moral lesson steeped in conservative cultural customs and precepts.

The visual language of A Vue employs three layers of representation. The backgrounds, comprised of ink drawings on watercolor paper, establish a sober grisaille landscape that is similar in humorless intensity to the musical score. The clay-animated puppets are dressed in clothes made from burlap and other vernacular fabric that is detailed with unusually large buttons and hand-stitched details. The figures are void of emotion and move in a deliberate, almost sedated manner. The pulse of the video results from the stop-motion technique Mosley employs to animate the drawings and the puppets. Each frame jumps around and vibrates with energy and jittery urgency that counters the resolute nature of the narrative.

The bronze statue standing unyielding and static as the puppets and painted gray background precariously flicker around it epitomizes the virtues of service and duty. Its sheer enormity in relationship to the town and tiny population is by any other account ridiculous. But towering within the context of Mosley's parable, the Carver sculpture marks the landscape with the same hierarchical, religious-like precepts as an Egyptian obelisk or a Medieval Gothic spire. Its form and meaning are inescapable. Residents literally have to live in its shadow.

Mosley is taking on the moral complexities of contemporary American life in A Vue. Refusing to be polemical, he coaxes out the virtuous and the nocuous in traditional and progressive models of behavior. George Washington Carver is admirable. But does one want to be like him–like Henry, the park ranger, whose over-commitment to his professional role is less human than monumental?The self-sufficiency and determination that guided Carver (a slave born in Diamond Grove, Missouri in 1864) can also lead to a lifeless, drab existence. A fictional character like Mosley's Henry, a lonely man driven to maintain the virtues that changed the agricultural economy of the South, is both pathetic and commendable.

Visual storytelling and narrative-based work is prevalent in contemporary art practice but it is most often grounded in the idiosyncratic or the illustrative, taking great pains to illustrate someone else's books, movies, or song lyrics. The narratives explored by young artists today are often just compelling eccentricities hatched from their own fascination with other cultural phenomena. Take the proliferation of gothic•oriented work as an example. But Mosley does something more risky by sorting through political issues of consequence. His exhibition at Donald Young Gallery is much more than offbeat biographical research into the likes of George Washington Carver. Instead, Mosley's work poses questions greater than his own curiosities. questions of social import-the big questions other artists are afraid or too polite to ask in public exhibition.