JOSH SCHULTZ: Forward Observer

There are times when an artist drops into the pocket and doesn’t even know it. Knowledge and recognition of change happening simultaneously in real time can often be difficult to label— like art, like life, like war, like death— might not transition be growth no matter what the result of the action? That seems to be what we want to teach our children, but teaching an artist is something altogether other. Teaching a soldier anything about life seems almost impossible as a civilian, like an act of hubris. Sometimes teacher and student make sense of each other.

Urging Josh Schultz on was not difficult, he is fully prepared for movement to contact.

These spray-painted stencils and vibrant, large scale works on paper reflect the former soldier’s experience. Bold, graphic depictions in vivid night vision greens, of moments of engagement with an unseen enemy, countered by the hawk and woodland creatures of Schultz’s backyard populating this landscape’s mid-battle haze and fog as rough, impulsive sculptures regenerated from the abundant ruins of Nashville’s recent ice storm.

I met Josh Schultz first as his teacher and immediately recognized something urgent in his art and something plangent in his history. Unlike many artists, Josh maneuvers a complicated balancing act; patriot and iconoclast, proud American and guilty pawn, accomplished warrior and soulful seer, he is routinely reminded of a vivid past and happy to be alive every morning. Diligent in his practice and openly seeking nature’s purity in a dirty world, Schultz unravels the frenetic and threatening instances of life and death situations.

When Alex Lockwood of Elephant Gallery offered me the use of this space for the summer my first thought was to program this solo exhibition. We open the show on National PTSD Awareness Day in honor of the men and women who protect us whether we like it or not.

Born and raised in Nashville, Josh Schultz is in his second year at Belmont University’s Watkins School of Art MFA program. He served our country in conflict in the Middle East from 2000-2002. The jury is out on which tenure has been more difficult.

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