Disrupting the conventional at Joshua Petker's Ashes/Ashes

Joshua Petker, "Some Hippies and a Hobo," installation view, 2015 (Ashes/Ashes)In Joshua Petker’s flaming crimson painting “Monster & Cop,” a menacing cartoon policeman wielding a fat bludgeon scowls at a tall pile of errant brushstrokes of brightly colored paint. Painting is cast as the title’s wayward monster, seemingly without purpose but in need of official monitoring.

Nearby in Petker’s exhibition at Ashes/Ashes, a second small painting shows a balding, bearded man wearing a disheveled toga and sprawling casually on the ground. The exiled Greek philosopher Diogenes, who valued action over theory, contemplates another pile of bristling brushstrokes. One wonders what mischief the…