About

Bio

Joss Kitts is an artist in Knoxville, Tennessee, working across photography, software, and sculpture. He paints into archival and found photographs stroke by stroke, using arithmetic in place of pigment. He is interested in what happens when a photograph is made to act upon itself, and in what remains of places and people once its account of them begins to come apart.

Kitts has exhibited at the Ewing Gallery, the McClung Museum, and Gallery 1010. His solo exhibition Holding Their Memories was presented at Gallery 1010 in 2024.

He earned his B.F.A. in Studio Art from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2024), where he is currently a candidate for the Master of Landscape Architecture.

• CV (PDF)
• contact [at] josskitts [dot] com
• Instagram @joss.script

Statement

My practice begins with the photograph as a material that can be worked. I paint into photographs stroke by stroke, using non-generative image processing software. Utilizing exemplar-based patch synthesis, in which the photograph searches its existing material for patches that correspond to the areas I paint, I keep the brush an intentional, physical gesture, moving pieces of the photograph itself rather than pigment. This material can be pulled along a path, repeated, displaced or deliberately drawn from specific locations. I use this process not to repair or conceal an image, but to introduce controlled uncertainty into it. The photograph becomes internally inconsistent, operating between recognition and disruption without immediately becoming unreadable.

I am interested in this instability in relation to people and places. Photographs can preserve a particular moment, person or place, producing an authoritative record. By allowing the work to repeat, shift, flatten, smear and reorganize itself, I use the present act of painting to process the past, watching the record begin to come apart.

My work occupies the space between photographic record and constructed image. Existing material becomes the source of its own alteration, and as it quotes itself, it begins to resemble memory, retaining fragments of the past as repeated recollection alters and reorganizes them over time.