Biography
Justin is a conceptual and research based artist working along the Northeast Corridor, in and between New York and Washington, D.C. His childhood home was haunted, and he was seemingly predestined to involve himself in areas of the uncanny: his biological father was born in Amityville, New York, site of the well-known alleged demonic possession and subsequent murder story; his maternal grandmother was born and raised in Sleepy Hollow, New York – the location known for the folklore of Washington Irving, who embedded into American psyche a pervasive and ghostly cultural identity with his Headless Horseman; he himself was born in Aurora, Colorado, the site that would become infamous for the 2012 movie theater shootings where 12 people died. He was raised in northern New Jersey, in a small, rural town that Weird New Jersey Magazine once coined the epicenter for “weirdness” in the entire state.
He received his MFA in Visual Art from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2014 and his BFA in Art and Visual Technology from George Mason University in 2011. His practice involves archiving and researching to connect data through time and space to document instances beyond the veil of the present, reaching back to the past and into the future. He combines media to create new narratives within our popular culture, redefining meaning and reinterpreting context in order to display new ways of viewing. His work has been shown across the United States and internationally.
Image: In/Between | A Rock and a Hard Place exhibition, by Justin Roykovich