Joe Amrhein
Scroll 2
2009
Enamel and goldleaf on mylar
42 inches high / 4 inches diameter
https://www.joeamrhein.com
Joe Amrhein lives and works in Brooklyn
“My work is a combination of different disciplines— physically, it comes out of painting but the context is conceptual. I use language, text, and font icons as my primary subject with reference to sign painting which gives this language scale and vitality and comes out of my background as a sign painter. The materials I paint on, glass and vellum, besides being traditional surfaces for signs, give me the option to develop the text with a metaphorical content—notions of density, fracturing, memory and shadows as ephemera, among others. The source for most of the text in this work is appropriated, critical art writing, magazines, newspapers and other sources. The notion that this language replaces the context it’s describing—replacing an idea or something concrete with abstract language—is very interesting to me, but bringing this abstract notion of language back into a visual art is even more interesting. The use of translation, cyphers and codes and the fallibility of perception is new to the work. Quoting Robert Smithson, ‘One must remember that writing on art replaces presence by absence by substituting the abstraction of language for the real thing.’ Some of the text I compose is not meant to be read but is used almost as an artifact, because it is so highly fragmented.”
– Joe Amrhein