Josh Winkler
Printmaking
wink0167@umn.edu
www.joshkwinkler.com
www.joshkwinkler.blogspot.com
the middlewest & otherwise
color woodcut
39"x52"
2009
mega folk fauna & the death of mammoths
woodcut and lithograph
30"x36"
2010
Human paradise in the desertlands
color woodcut
23"x35"
2010
My images and texts emphasize the growing disconnect between Americans and the land, the physical shaping of the land with highly specialized earth manipulating machines, and also the quirky human objects and curiosities of the landscape that highlight human presence on the earth's surface. Travel, personal experience, and direct observation inform the work. I relate my perceptual encounters in the landscape to art histories, literary narratives, and histories of humanity in the western world.
A current body of work is titled Monuments, Miracles, & Mega Folk Fauna. These woodcuts and lithographs conglomerate human anomalies along the land into fabricated epic landscape scenes of activity and guilty pleasure. By emphasizing the disturbing intricacies of our daily landscapes, these scenes arouse satirical questions of the role of the human animal and its omnipotent grasp over the earth and its resources.
Human paradise in the desertlands depicts an Acadia of human pleasure in the arid Mojave Desert region of California's Central Valley. Fiberglass folk fauna & the death of mammoths considers the overkill extinction theory of late Pleistocene mega fauns in relation to their fiberglass monuments in South Dakota. The land diorama lures the natural history museum outdoors to iterate the man-taming of nature where no size is too large and no beast is too strong.
