Joe Park | You Are The Space Between
July 17 - August 30, 2025
Opening Reception: July 16, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
First Thursday: August 7, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
You Are The Space Between by Joe Park incorporates art historical references and invites viewers to complete the imagery Park alludes to through his mark-making process. These paintings bring together several aspects of Park’s previous work, including explorations of representation and abstraction and multidimensional perspectives, using a process-based application of paint to describe the spaces between matter that we don’t see.
In these works, Park depicts particles tracing arcs through space, colliding, and eventually coming together to form wavy grids that create a figuration of the space between objects and people. In exploring this inter-object space, Park creates a liminal reality that simultaneously obscures and defines images, allowing them to appear and then fade depending on how the viewer looks at the painting. Without a single focal point, the images, or non-images, in each painting resolve depending on how the viewer focuses on the work, creating a sort of “myopic impressionism” of non-immediate imagery.
Park’s abstract paintings are known for their color and surface, made of thousands of layered, painted lines that vibrate and expand, recalling natural phenomena. Park often references historical movements in his work, ranging from the Op Art of Bridget Riley, the Northwest mysticism of Mark Tobey and Morris Graves to the transcendental art-making ethos of Agnes Martin.
Joe Park draws inspiration from the history of art and often references historical movements or specific artists working in painting, photography and sculpture. Park creates prismatic portraits, figures and still life’s in addition to abstract works known for their color and surface. Park received his BFA from Cornish College of the Arts (Seattle, WA) and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, CA). He has exhibited at the Gwangju Biennale (Gwangju, South Korea), Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington (Seattle, WA), Seattle Art Museum (Seattle, WA), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), and Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA). His work is included in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum and the Tacoma Art Museum. He is a 2005 recipient of the NEDDY Award from the Behnke Foundation and an Artist Trust Fellowship.