A new decade of contemporary sculpture
Joe Winter
New York artist Joe Winter re-purposes familiar technologies in order to give them an entirely new identity and function.
Works such as cassette tapes that are re-threaded to 'draw' moving forms as they spool, (below) or telephones that talk only to each other, provide everyday objects with unconventional contexts and unexpected poetic possibility.
Winter's most recent project, Xerox Astronomy, (left and below) uses a photocopier to "model the movements of distant bodies" - the 'distant bodies' in question actually consisting of desk-style lamps mechanically rotated above the copier bed.
The paths of these orbiting objects are documented through a continual production of photocopies, each of the resulting images suggestive of various forms of scientific representation, such as astrophotography or sonography.
At a point in time when rapid technological progress is both taken for granted and increasingly dominates our lives, Winter redefines the intensely utilitarian nature of many technologies by investing them with playful, unlooked for possibility.
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