Origin

After my mother became ill, I left New York for Virginia to live with my grandparents. My father was away at sea, working on submarines. These early experiences of dislocation, absence, and transition shaped my enduring preoccupation with time, being, and perception.

The landscape of my childhood felt vast and untamed—dense forests, open fields, and winding backroads shaped my relationship with nature, instilling a sense of wonder and solitude that continues to inform my work. This connection to place, both real and imagined, permeates my practice, grounding even my most speculative explorations in a tactile, lived experience of the world. My gentle and hardworking grandparents were transplants from the North like me. My grandmother spent her days cooking and gardening, while my grandfather built furniture and repaired propane truck engines as a mechanic. Their dedication to craftsmanship and labor instilled in me a deep appreciation for making—both as a practical skill and a means of understanding the world.

My practice is rooted in an ongoing meditation on personal and collective memory, continually questioning the nature of time and existence. I explore perception, embodiment, displacement, language, and longing through immersive video and hybrid process-based painting. The absence of the body is a recurring motif in my work, articulating a sense of yearning for an as-yet-unrealized future. Drawing from art history, pop culture, speculative fiction, and emerging technologies, I create spaces where memory, materiality, and possibility converge.


Material

In the past, I have worked with oil paint, sequin fabric, bleach, and velvet. As I pursue the truth of these materials, my work explores human perception and longing. I connect with the material's inherent qualities and properties as I work. I listen for the work that needs making. I record it with experimental video or in alternative process photography. I have become a lens-based artist, but my earlier identity as a painter shines through in my art. I have worked with watercolor, ink, light, salt, indigo, and heat.


Biography

As an internationally exhibited artist, joy tirade has shown work at The Kamloops Art Gallery (British Columbia), Universitet I Oslo (Norway), Vilnius Academy of Arts (Lithuania), Ideas Block LT (Lithuania), and CICA (South Korea).

joy has exhibited nationally in the Mid-Atlantic Region at The Mint Museum, The Ackland Art Museum, CAM, The Carrack, and LUMP projects in North Carolina, and in Virginia at The Garage, The Bridge PAI, WTVF/Radio IQ Gallery, New City Arts, Art Works Gallery, The IX Building, and Ruffin Gallery at the University of Virginia.

Her work has appeared in numerous other venues, including The Masur Museum (Monroe, LA), The Fluorescent Gallery (Nashville, TN), The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center (Covington, KY), Red Ink Studios (San Francisco), and at LACDA (Los Angeles).

joy tirade's work has appeared in several publications, including The Third Coast, The Virginia Literary Review, 3.7, Summmer, and the Mildred Pierce zine. Recently, her work was published by Routledge Press as a book cover. amzn.to/2p8ZYHU

joy tirade holds a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Art and Theory from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously, she graduated from the University of Virginia with Distinction and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa and was awarded a Bachelor of Art in Studio Art and Art History.

She lives and works in Oakland, California, where she teaches art and facilitates a free community artist collective whose goal is to offer free art advice for beginners; see @__officehours on Instagram.