Songs Against Themselves is a solo exhibition of recent work by New York-based artist Joseph Hart that continues to unravel and play with imagery from the natural world, abstraction, and the interplay between drawing and painting. The artist employs hundreds of graphite drawings as meditative beginnings, which then inform larger paintings created with crayon and acrylic on canvas. Rather than serving as sketches, discoveries from drawings collide into singular new paintings, with sequences from one work flipped and reimagined into the next. The exhibition explores themes of emotional complexity—rage, joy, fear, beauty, grotesqueness, love, and conflict—while seeking balance between control and chaos. Forms and imagery derive from Hart's observations of nature, including catalpa leaves, animal skulls, and other found materials from his New York environment.
