By JRS
Joseph Ari Aloi, aka JK5. Photo by Bryce Ward.
The early twentieth-century house stands like a beacon in the middle of the block on a quiet Fort Greene, Brooklyn street. Ornate cast-iron columns elucidate austere architectural integrity. Shadowing the archetypal structure, a mass of concrete, glass, and, undoubtedly, new stainless steel appliances for marketing brokers to crow about in the Sunday real estate section of the Times lurches upward out of the earth, seemingly to overpower its predecessor. I ask my host if he’s ever seen the film Up. He laughs and nods, saying that he watched it the previous night. His glance travels across the rubble-strewn lot with a look sentimental despondency before it dies on a piece of modern machinery; he’s an old soul in a young and intricately adorned body, which he refers to as his “Jedi Knight-flight suit.”
Joseph Ari Aloi, aka JK5, is a modern-day Baudelaire; a strange flower offering a vestige of color in a barren and cragged winter field. When he speaks directly to you, it’s nearly impossible to break the gaze of his Husky-esque eyes, fearing one sidelong glance will deter this fiercely unique conversation. It seems quite possible that no one has ever strung together a sentence in such a beautifully congenital and elaborate web. Perhaps that’s what makes discussing his art in close-cropped, minute detail such an undertaking. When it comes to his work, he’s as articulate as he is loquacious.
Before I met him, I had never heard anyone talk about our reproductive organs so much (to put it conservatively and bashfully, something he is not when it comes to the subject) and has had people ask him why he uses them so often as focal points in his paintings. “People are always like ‘Why’s there so many vaginas in your work?’ and I’m like ‘Because we all come from one.’ We’re all one with that, aside from a million other reasons why vaginas are so beautiful…and cool. When I published my book, people were like ‘Why are there so many penises in your book?’ and I was like ‘Because I have one and it’s the spark of all life and none of us are here without the shit that’s inside a penis.’ I think my experience of being reunited with my birthmother sent me right back up inside the womb and I think I hung out in there for a while and came back out with millions of things to give a visual language to.”
Photo by Bryce Ward
His work is deeply personal—almost to the point of obsession—and it has come to embody his entire psyche. Numbers and anagrams and palindromes are all fair game and are used with precision and the utmost reverence. The number three has a unique and personal set of values, and is the theme of his upcoming show, “3morrow,” that will ultimately come to fruition in SoHo sometime this year. “My work, in one way or another, is always deeply personal and autobiographical, illustrating something that is going on internally or how close I am to the process of creating and how much I simply love to draw and create something new all the time.”
He’s a very devout self-professed “Sci-Fi nerd,” and a big part of his work is “exploring science fiction and outer space and marrying that with what’s going on internally, spiritually, and biologically through form and a narrative in an imagistic celebration. Coming up with a language that has a power, that has a light, that has a distinct quality that’s unique but vibrating on more timeless universal questions.”
An awe-inspiring tale that captivated me the first time we sat down to talk was that of his reuniting with his birth mother on November 19, 1993, during his senior year at RISD. This has perhaps been one of the most driving and influential forces to drive his craft; a deeply emotional vessel for his art. “My adoption reunion full-circle, cycle story has brought me into intimate touch with my emotions and my experience of birth and nature/nurture and the complexity of our psychology. My vehicle has always been pure creation; making art and weaving tales, visually.”
Photo by Bryce Ward
Sitting in his studio, his eyes light up when I mention his new show, “3morrow” and he starts speaking with fluidity and a cohesiveness that one seldom finds off the pages of a contrived press release or cue card. “I became a father April 1st, and as a result, I have a lot of new imagery and new iconography and feelings to illustrate and get out there and express, so I drew, as I always do, through my wife’s pregnancy. These new paintings are basically newly spontaneous and, hopefully, interesting paintings based on all these original drawings I did during her pregnancy. They’re celebrating what it’s like to become a father—how completely transformative, enlightening, insane, and intense that is. It celebrates pure child-ness; pure consciousness of a child and what really happens to your consciousness and your level of inspiration and awareness and vision once you bring a new life into the world and you witness real-life childbirth. So, the drawings are from the nine month journey and some of them are version of my daughter Twyla and subconscious and otherworldly sci-fi, cartoon narratives that are all about trying to stay really simple and direct, but trying to illuminate some deeper concept and experience we have with consciousness and what you consider a god-force or a creator and what we think is our own being, our own hand, our own craft.” He’s never been accused of being subdued in his descriptions.
SPREAD ArtCulture: What makes this work different from your past body of work?
Joseph Aloi: The work is what it is now because of what I’ve lived through in the past year. I feel like I have hundreds and hundreds of paintings in me that I need to get out. Internally, I have endless things I need to explore. This show is the kind of work I’ve been wanting to make since my last body of paintings two years ago. Everything I’ve been through has facilitated me to take the work to a whole other place. Hopefully the technique and my approach and the content is as evolving as I am and is where I am in my life.
SAC: Being familiar with your work like I am, I can say definitively that this is a whole other peak in your work: the divine femininity, a sense of family, and tight-knit emotions. It’s very visceral and emotional and I can tell that every brushstroke meant something to you.
JA: I couldn’t have put it better myself, and it’s a very optimistic way of describing what you’re seeing. It’s a big part of what I’m doing, but there’s so much insecurity and so many mistakes that I’ve made that have led to interesting aesthetic discoveries or where there’s a reaction, new things happen because I struggled with them, so there’s a lot to be said about marrying present-moment awareness, which is what I try to practice with a lot of self-doubt and insecurity and trying to quiet the internal dialogue and turn off the cacophony of insecurity and make the work that I know is surging through me. I’m really letting the process come alive and be it’s own unfolding.
SAC: Why the name “3morrow”?
JA: The nucleus of this new level for me is the word “3morrow.” It’s about what happens as a passionate-prolific-spastic creator whose been one with their inner child for a world of reasons and a world of nurtured intent and practice. What happens when they go from two to three? The power and the magic of the number three, the dynamics of one, oneness; two, couple; three, family. That baby is symbolic of the way all things begin and grow and develop. It’s a metaphor for the way all life blossoms. To me, there’s incredible beauty, and power, and awe in those forces and in the very essence of what we are, and I’m just attempting to bring as much of that energy and life and relationship and dynamic into the work.
An untitled painting for the upcoming show, "3morrow"
In the middle of the interview, Joseph’s wife Adrienne, whom he calls Azzy, climbed the stairs to the studio with baby Twyla, an effervescent doppleganger for Cindy Lou Who, squirming in her arms. Twyla underwent two separate brain surgeries in her first couple months and is now what the doctors call “the poster child for recovery.”
Azzy, an artist in her own right, is one of Joseph’s driving forces and inspirations behind his work. Unlike those who shut themselves off from outside influences when creating, he embraces it. “The hardest thing as an artist is objectivity; it’s distance. You’re so emotionally intertwined with the work, you’re so connected to it, you’re either so proud of it and excited about it or painfully insecure and broken over what to do next. It’s a really gentle balance so, for me, good honest critiques, objectivity, and someone looking at it with a fresh eye, like you, makes me stoked. My wife’s my most honest, open critic. She’s rad, and she’s right. I know how it feels to me; I know how much I struggle to get to a point to where it looks like it was all planned out or it’s a nice clean painting. There’s an incredible amount of works that go into it. Some days go better than others. Some days are diamonds and some days are rocks.”
Presently, the details of JK5’s upcoming show remain a bit hazy. “I have to call the gallery owner and find out what’s going on.” In the meantime, he continues to paint, and is nearly finished with the eight agreed-upon pieces for the show, which SPREAD ArtCulture will feature in a future post. As Baudelaire wrote in The Seven Old Men:
