An artist attuned to the vagaries of contemporary cultural memory, Joseph Yaeger’s practice can be thought of as a parallel investigation in the fetishisation of images in contemporary libidinal economies, and in painting’s contemporaneous agency in the transformation and circulation of the visible. 

“The imagery I use is a protracted search to better understand myself; playing or putting on roles that might clarify an interior that is sort of naturally hidden, even from myself. I’ll come across an image––sometimes I’m searching for one, sometimes I stumble into it––and the feeling of it, the arrangement, the subject, the relation of subjects within the image, will sort of jar me, attract me, dislodge me.” 

The images appear at first glance immediately recognisable and equally untraceable, an uncanny déjà vu.

Following the PNI Online presentation, The Writer, Yaeger’s first solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, Doublespeak, 2021, took glass as a guiding visual metaphor for the distorting qualities of language. Yaeger will present his second solo gallery exhibition in 2023.