Joseph Pine
he/they
Hurley, NY, USA
Joseph Pine is an artist, metalsmith, and educator living and working in the Hudson Valley, NY. He earned his BFA in Metals from SUNY New Paltz and his MFA in Metalsmithing & Jewelry from UW-Madison.
“My work combines action with a sensitivity to entropy. I am interested in moments of creation and becoming, frozen in matter. Emphasizing texture, color and form, I imbue my work with undercurrents of personal history and narrative.
Scars and topographies in skin are mapped using carbon and paper, and further explored and abstracted through clashes between tin and distressed copper.
Silvery tin acts as a graft, forming a second skin on copper. Gesture reflects the act of change, permanent alteration.”
What does being queer mean to you in relation to your material choices? Is it something you consider?
“I believe that I see (and treat) materials through a queer lens. By which I mean I embrace the various historically undesirable qualities of those materials. Copper is an easy material to love when brought to a warm, glowing shine, just as silver grabs light and dances through the room, catching hearts and eyes. I’m more interested in leaky copper pipes and tarnished silver, whose beauty lies in the patinas and ravages of time and the world. I look at these materials with empathy and with a sense of shared weariness."
"Second Skin", Copper, tin, 12" x 12" x .5", 2024Is the work queer because the maker is queer, or is it queer because the subject matter is queer?
“Queerness has rarely been an overt subject in my work, but my perspective is inextricable from my own queerness and subtle sense of ‘otherness’ that comes with it. Because of this, my work is inherently but quietly queer."
