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I met up with the puckish Joseph Aloi, in his home on a quiet Tuesday, who, clad in a worn T-shirt of his own design and two full sleeves of tattoos was in the midst of ordering a garden burger over the telephone as he admitted to me that he was a hypoglycemic. In between bites and sometimes with mouthfuls of food, tactfully shy of being rude, we talked about things like “the pre-consequence age” and “dermal terrain.” When Joseph finished his garden burger, he promptly pulled open the window making his sunny Brooklyn apartment even sunnier, as he impishly told me that he could only smoke when the window was open and his girlfriend was out. |
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Patient Rendering – James Hilger
I met up with the puckish Joseph Aloi, in his home on a quiet Tuesday, who, clad in a worn T-shirt of his own design and two full sleeves of tattoos was in the midst of ordering a garden burger over the telephone as he admitted to me that he was a hypoglycemic.
In between bites and sometimes with mouthfuls of food, tactfully shy of being rude, we talked about things like “the pre-consequence age” and “dermal terrain.” When Joseph finished his garden burger, he promptly pulled open the window making his sunny Brooklyn apartment even sunnier, as he impishly told me that he could only smoke when the window was open and his girlfriend was out. When the wheels of my ancient tape recorder finally started to spin, we were passing the tiny black microphone back and forth the way two high-schoolers might pass an airplane-sized bottle of liquor between them while sitting in an abandoned car with grass growing on the dashboard.
James Hilger: What’s your full name?
Joseph Aloi: Joseph Aloi, aka, “JK5.”
JH: What is that Italian?
JA: Why yes, it is.
JH: I understand that you are, among other things, a pretty sought-after tattoo artist. Is ink the only thing in your needles?
JA: (laughs) Just ink, the force and a lot of TLC.
JH: How long have you been tattooing?
JA: I’ve been tattooing since September 1994, so about 12 years.
JH: How is tattooing different from drawing on paper? Do you ever think, "My god, this stuff is alive?"
JA: Tattooing skin and drawing on paper are quite different on many levels. For one thing, a tattoo artist works on living, breathing humans. Tattooing, as a medium, has its own unique properties and finite limitations.
JH: Would you say there is a spiritual element to tattooing?
JA: I think there’s an inherent spirituality and spirit life to all things. Tattooing is a powerful art form that aligns you with whole other frequencies and energies.
JH: I understand you work on a lot of non-living canvas as well. Tell me about the visual art you do that doesn’t need to be washed occasionally.
JA: I’ve always been creating, drawing and working in other mediums. My personal work has been evolving through my lifetime. It’s a complex system of iconographic and textual narratives that is constantly expanding and contracting. There are entire worlds, characters, languages, symbols…an organic blend of styles and inspirations…my personal path and mythological journey, sexuality, science fiction, pop culture, reactions and interpretations, dreams, moments, portraits, poems, logo perversions, imagistic storytelling, et cetera. Everything is a seed and I am always drawing, documenting, experimenting and making. Right now, I’m working on new paintings and a sculptural object installation for the show that will launch my toy series. These new works are playful, psychedelic, sci-fi and child-world character-fueled experiments in acrylic on wood panel.
JH: Tell me what a "Flowbot" is?
JA: A Flowbot is my introductory toy series with Kid Robot. There are eight characters in all that will be full color, two-by-four inch vinyl toys. Each character has a symbol, a medium, message and metaphor. They each occupy a realm and are the first of their kind. One of them is of my best friend and biggest inspiration. They will be released in late September…stay tuned.
JH: There seems to be a whole mythology in your work. It’s very Eastern. Can you sum it up for us in five haikus or less?
JA: [Laughs] The east is the yeast/ the west/ the external beast feast…Wonderful.
JH: What kind of work can you see yourself doing as a very old man?
JA: I love that question. I would have to say in some ways work that’s very similar to what I’m doing now, just then—what the world is, what my internal world is at the time. There’s a constant, there’s an essence, a constancy and a oneness and a woven thread from the womb through my lifetime, that if you know my work well is really evident. It’s as present and constant and evolving and moving as time and life itself.
There’s really a created document for most days that I’ve been alive. Hopefully, I live a long healthy life so I can just keep expanding these languages. By the time I’m an old man, hopefully, I’m still insatiably curious about what’s happening around me and inside me and I’m documenting it all—and still just really wild and free with what I’m making and what’s really happening with my hands.
JH: What about the kind of work you’ll do in the after-life, if you believe in such a place?
JA: Oh, man! Well, a lot of what I’m trying to illuminate in my work now is the truth of Heaven or the spiritual dimension being inside us and being live and present with us all the time—and breaking down the boundaries between fantasy and reality and the conscious and subconscious realms. Hopefully, I’m reincarnated into some crystalized translucent light blue light whose very limbs are drawing tools. And maybe I don’t need surfaces to work on or actual implements. Maybe it’s just coming out of me in some energy, frequency or form.
