Fragments

A few thousand years of history brings its own sorts of distances, and ways those distances are elided. There’s all this stuff still hanging around. Go to a museum and you can see it all at once, this accumulation of artifacts, flattened by artificial proximity. But the cultural world has constellations too: narratives and value systems to connect the dots, a whole technology of display to demonstrate importance. How else can people be expected to navigate?

Joseph Hart is an intrepid navigator of distances–aesthetic and astronomical. Sometimes obsessive, sometimes casual and a bit loopy, his paintings pay as much attention to the maps as to the territory. They look at what gets put on pedestals and how things are framed. Hart lives in New York, where there are lots of museums, but he grew up in a small town in New Hampshire, where there are dark nights, with lots of stars. His childhood bedroom was filled with trophies. That’s important too, probably.

—Steven Stern