Inside the Cocoon:
Joey Glover's Paintings
at the Edge of the Human

There is a painting in Joey Glover's Gowanus studio that stops you. It depicts a humanoid figure — machine in form, composed in posture, painted with the deliberateness of a Flemish court portrait. The figure holds its frame with something approaching dignity. Not menace. Not servitude. Something stranger: the quiet confidence of an arriving guest who knows the house is already theirs.

Glover has been working toward this image for years. His practice is organized into ongoing series, but all of them orbit the same gravitational center: the transformation of human experience under the pressure of technology, surveillance, and the slow automation of everything we once considered irreducibly ours. He calls it, with the compressed precision of a painter, a meditation on metamorphosis — "a biological caterpillar making a cocoon to become a digital butterfly."

That line could easily read as a slogan. In Glover's hands, it reads as a research agenda — one he pursues slowly, on large canvases, in oil.

Machines with Dignity, Cities That Already Feel Gone

The flagship series, Les Robots Arrivent Bientôt — French for "the robots are arriving soon" — takes its cue from Baroque portraiture. Each painting depicts a humanoid machine in the compositional language of the seventeenth century: formal, frontal, bathed in raking light. The figures are composed with the dignity painters once reserved for saints and sovereigns. They are not threatening. They are patient. They have, the paintings suggest, already won.

The choice of Baroque language is precise. Glover is interested in what portraiture has always done — confer status, record presence, declare that someone was here and mattered — and he wants to ask what it means to extend that gesture to a machine. The answer the paintings give is uncomfortable: it means that the machine is now the subject of history, and that we are the world it is inheriting.

Running parallel to the robots is NY State of Mind, a series of city paintings that operate at the opposite end of the emotional register. Where the robot portraits are formal and composed, the cityscapes are achingly ordinary: an empty subway platform at the wrong hour, the Bloody Angle in Chinatown early on a weekday morning, a Pearl Street diner glimpsed through a wall of glass, a corner bodega painted with the attention Edward Hopper gave to diners in New England. "These cityscapes are painted slow on purpose," Glover writes. "They are the stage on which the surveillance cameras hang and the robots are arriving. They are also love letters — to a city that is photographed more than any other place on Earth, and that almost no one ever really sees."

That phrase — almost no one ever really sees — is as good a description of Glover's method as any. He paints familiar things at the register of attention that transforms them: not the Instagram composition, not the tourist frame, but the sustained look that discloses what is usually edited out.

Cameras as Deities, Camouflage as Brand

In Spy vs Spy and Peek-a-Boo, Glover's lens shifts from the figure to the apparatus of observation itself. The surveillance camera — the dome, the housing, the small red indicator light — appears in these paintings not as a prop but as a subject, rendered with the same gravity a Baroque painter would bring to a relic or a scepter. In Killa Cam, the dome reflects a fish-eyed New York intersection back at itself: the city is simultaneously watcher and watched, mirror and subject.

Peek-a-Boo extends this logic into camouflage. A figure in a ballgown blooms in cyan and magenta camo. A 55-gallon paint drum wears a jungle pattern it cannot escape. The argument the series makes is sharp and contemporary: that camouflage in the twenty-first century is not concealment but branding, that visibility and invisibility have collapsed into a single design problem. To be seen and to be hidden are now the same gesture. The eye that watches wears the same pattern as the body that hides.

Glover's time studying traditional Japanese printmaking in Tokyo in 2004 — at Temple University Japan and the Naganuma School — surfaces clearly in this work. The layered patterning, the conviction that ornament is also subject, the attention to surface as meaning: these are not decorative choices. They are structural ones.

D-Fens: The Figure Who Has Not Yet Been Replaced

If the robot portraits depict the future arriving with composure, the D-Fens series depicts the human present feeling its approach on every nerve. Named for Michael Douglas's character in Joel Schumacher's Falling Down (1993) — the late-stage American briefcase man who cracks one morning and simply walks home through the city — the series paints what Glover calls "the human counterpoint to the Robots: the figure who has not yet been replaced, but who feels the pressure of replacement."

In one canvas, his body unravels into wireframe nerves. A graffito at his feet reads The Robots Are Coming Here. The image is part protest, part elegy, part self-portrait. White shirt, tie, briefcase. The uniform of the person who built the economy that built the machine that is coming for him.

"Automation is felt long before it arrives," Glover writes. This is perhaps the thesis of the whole practice. The paintings are not warnings; warnings presuppose there is still time to act. These are documents — careful, slow, painted documents of a metamorphosis already underway.

A Designer Who Paints, or a Painter Who Designs

Glover came to painting through a circuitous route. Born in Melbourne, Florida in 1977, he moved to New York in 1999 and spent the early 2000s working across design, fashion, and media — as a digital encoder and supervisor at Viacom / MTV Networks, as a designer in brand identity and apparel, as a collaborator with clients including Nike, Marc Jacobs, OriginalFake (KAWS), Colette Paris, Burton Snowboards, and the Gap. He earned his BFA in Painting from Pace University in 2008, studying under Jane Dickson and Linda Gottesfeld, and graduated Magna Cum Laude.

The design work is not incidental to the painting. It shows up in the precision of his compositions, in the way he thinks about pattern and surface, in his comfort with image as communication rather than pure expression. But the painting is clearly primary — in time, attention, and stakes. His first solo exhibition, Please Listen to My Demo, was presented at BT+A Gallery in Sag Harbor in 2019. His group shows include a 2015 exhibition at Sacred Gallery curated by Ricky Powell, and earlier appearances at WhiteBox and Fuse Gallery.

The studio in Gowanus is where the two practices meet. Brooklyn — its light, its density, its particular blend of the working and the aspirational — is not just setting but subject. The NY State of Mind canvases could only have been made by someone who has moved through these streets at odd hours for more than two decades. They have the accuracy of long attention.

Japan, 2027: The Surveillance Series Continues

In August 2027, Glover will be in residence at the Studio Kura Artist in Residence Program in Itoshima, Fukuoka, Japan — returning to the country where his attention to pattern and surface first took shape in 2004. He is working on a Japan-set continuation of his surveillance series: a set of paintings that will bring the camera-as-subject into a new urban and cultural context, and ask what it means to watch and be watched in a society with its own complex relationship to visibility, conformity, and the machine.

The residency is not a departure. It is, like everything in Glover's practice, a deepening of a question he has been asking since he arrived in this city and started paying attention. What are we becoming? What are we leaving behind? And who — or what — will paint us when we are gone?

The robots in his canvases do not answer. They sit for their portraits, composed and patient, and let the question hang in the room.