* This show will also have an additional Reception on July 2nd from  6pm -9pm. Come celebrate Proximity's Two Year Anniversary this night too!!

Are we ever really ourselves?  More often than not, the way we act toward others is but a slight manifestation of the person we truly are in our hearts and heads; a projection of a person specially designed to meet another’s expectations.  With this, who can you say you truly know?  Your friends?  Your family?  Yourself?  Even interactions between good friends, significant others and close family are no more than superficial surface scrapes.

In his new series of miniature portraits, all measuring under two inches, JoKa expresses this concept through his interpretation of family and close friends -- people he  is acquainted with, but whom he might not truly know.  A pointillist, JoKa uses toothpicks as his sole form of paint application.  Beyond giving him control and precision, this process gives him a level of intimacy with his subjects that conveys the subtleties and (in)sincerity in each expression, and in presenting each persona, as any artist does, he injects in each portrait elements of his own personality.

When not painting his familiar strangers, JoKa’s common subjects include charbroiled meat, sex, dissection, hypnosis, corruption of youth, morbid obesity, swashbuckling, insects, male-pattern baldness, bumps, self-loathing, ham, candy corn and clones. His work has been called nostalgic, though not by him. His art has been featured nationally and internationally, and in national art publications.  He is a carnivore.