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3D Art That Explores the Collective Unconscious

The 3D artist Pieter Jossa weaves the occult, advertising, and philosophy into hyper-colorful 3D images.
Images courtesy the artist

Consensus reality, however surreal and surprising it can be, is fairly standardized in that the normal and boring tend to overwhelm more original, mind-bending creations. The latter bleed over into the mainstream here and there, but mostly people seem content with predictability—it gives collective psyches something to count on.

The 3D artist Pieter Jossa is in open rebellion against this. He says that his many iridescent, hypercolored faces, tableaus and objects—wherein the occult and advertising’s subliminal messaging collide—can be traced back to his elementary school days.

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“When I was younger I went to a conservative school, [and] we had to color some pictures and I colored some girls' hair in the picture green, for which I got punished,” Jossa tells The Creators Project. “They put me in the corner of class and I had to wear donkey ears to humiliate me. I think this was the first example I could remember where a form of authority put pressure on me to conform to a standardized reality. A battle which I had to fight for many times over and over again with masculine authoritarian energies.”

Jossa says the current series of 3D images, and much of his other work, has to do with “redistribution of power by shifting the human towards a free independent conceptualization.” In his mind, it’s no longer up to anyone to identify what should or should not be represented.

“Everything is a temporary probability and not a fixed truth,” Jossa says. “The hypercolors are also a breaking free of the monotonous identification of color usage. Not that it's bad to use bland or neutral colors, I just prefer stepping into the surreal to representing the 'natural' (which is equally a temporary construct).”

Like his artistic motivation, Jossa’s history with 3D goes back to childhood. Always into graphics, by nine years old he had an MSN group called Jamazaki, an open forum where he and others posted weird “graphic stuff” and expressed themselves. At the same time, Jossa says that he was making “crappy poster designs” for commercial purposes, which created a tension between impulses that were more “personal, spiritual and material, real and fake.” As Jossa explains it, he only discovered his “inner creative and expressional child” when he got fed up with art school.

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“The more expressive ways of working with 3D came only about two years ago—at the moment I was in art school and not really enjoying myself,” he says. “I didn't like the assignments and it felt too limited. There were so many things I wanted to express so I decided to just do it on my own and I was happy that I did.”

While Jossa says he has artistic influences like Bianka Oravecz, Rachel Archibald, Cecily Feitel, Ryan Trecartin, and Nina Verhelst, occult philosophy from around the world has had a much larger impact on his art practice. This has led him to play around with concepts such as the collective, reality, digital shamanism, Indian philosophy, yin and yang, and conspiracy theories. These and other ideas have found output on his Collective Unconscious 3D Tumblr.

“The internet is the medium by which this philosophy is developing and it seems good,” Jossa says. “Among those, the concept of the collective unconscious and reality or 3D reality is what I'm always interested in, so I merged these two concepts into one. In time it grew stronger inside me and the concept I work with started gravitating more and more to the actual expression of a philosophy, which is now part of the art.”

On Feitel’s invitation, Jossa recently exhibited work at the Stimulation Overload exhibition at Superchief's recently launched new media art gallery in Soho. He also contributed work to Sooz, an online exhibition, where he explored stimulation overload and the collective unconscious by using text—a first for the artist. At the moment, Jossa is diving deeper into the philosophical aspect of his work on a blog platform he’s calling “the subtle dimension.”

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Click here to see more of Pieter Jossa’s work.

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