Joe Winter

Long Island City, NY

July-August 2010

During the course of my residency at Sculpture Space, I primarily spent my time making pieces that are part of an ongoing body of work titled …a history of light.

…a history of light treats images as temporary phenomena. This body of work employs light for both its creative and destructive energy, departing from the idea that the same energy necessary to produce a photographic image also ages and destroys the printed result.

The image components of the work are initially produced by using ultraviolet light to selectively fade common construction paper. Using fluorescent lamps as surrogate suns, the resulting images suggest various astronomical events. These original prints on unfixed paper have a lifespan of only a few weeks; to display them is to unmake them. They are digitally scanned and reproduced as archival inkjet prints, a form that has a longer, yet still finite lifespan of approximately 150 years. The prints are then mounted on cork and framed with UV-laminate glass. Selectively perforated, the glass partially blocks, partially allows light to enter. Hung in direct sunlight, this semi-protective barrier draws attention to the slow, inevitable transformation of the images.

The cork board is employed as a provisional structure, a temporary, ever-evolving display that is as much informational as aesthetic. Just as the fading images index their exposure to light, cork, a natural material, is prone to fading as well, registering the absence of images and objects once displayed, now removed.

About the Artist

Joe Winter, BA in New Media from Brown University and an MFA in Visual Art from UC San Diego. He has exhibited his work in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Great Britain, including at X-initiative (NY), Eyebeam (NY), the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Compact Space (LA), URBIS (UK), Estacion Tijuana, and the Western Front (Vancouver, BC). He has completed residencies through Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, the MacDowell Colony, Skowhegan, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and received an individual artist grant from the New York State Council for the Arts in 2009. His work has been featured on Rhizome, Artforum.com, and was documented in the Phaidon/New Museum publication Younger than Jesus: The Artist Directory. Upcoming projects include a site-specific installation at Bard's Center for Curatorial studies and a solo exhibition at The Kitchen in 2011.