S
culptor Joseph (Joey) Guy Gurka is a warm and funny New Jersey native who is passionate and precise in his art. A serious thinker, he cites Victor Delfin, Chuck Close, Tom Friedman, Boaz Vaadia, and Joaquin Torres Garcia as inspiration. Here is an excerpt from his philosophy:
“I find beauty in decay. The objects I collect have a history imbedded in them. I am very biased with what art, film, literature etcetera that I consume. In these times of information overload it can be quite difficult to keep one’s filter clean. As an artist I behave as the catalyst. I meet these objects at invariable points in their trajectories and freeze them in time. The transformation begins through the union of seemingly disparate objects to create a greater whole.... I allow my art to control me. Never vice versa.” Tell me about this [the keyboard piece]. One day I was running through Dumbo and noticed a piano overturned. Someone had just gone to town on it, smashing the keys in with their feet. [For me] it’s kind of like rescuing a wounded animal. I sat with it for a while before beginning to deconstruct it by cutting the wires, breaking off the keys and collecting its different components to bring back into the studio. My hands were all cut up and bloodied. [laughs] I sat with the pieces for a while. The keys themselves are what really struck me as being the most interesting aspect. Do you have a certain concept of this? In the past it used to be the entertainment of the household. Everyone would sit around the piano and play music. This piano wasn’t repaired as it would have been in the past, but simply discarded and left on the roadside. It’s pretty amazing. More and more I feel like people are losing the ability to communicate or socialize around normal settings. While I was cutting the strings off the sound struck me as being very compelling so I started recording the sound in the background. It feels like it’s the ghost or spirit of the piece and that’s what spoke to me most. All the discordance and abrasive notes are reflected in the energy I spent constructing it and the piece itself.
It’s untitled? Yes. I rarely title my pieces. [Regarding the Column]: This is a rendition of Brancusi’s Endless Column. I primarily work with what’s around me and Coke Zero cans are in surplus in my apartment. I let the piece slowly reduce in scale … it’s more powerful and the tension is more predominant on a smaller scale. I designed a template to create the shape that would then be folded, pop riveted, and placed over the dowels. This piece took me many many hours to finalize and to understand which direction it wanted to go in. It went through many incarnations, shapes: spirals, cubes, squares, and then finally went back to the initial piece. Which is the endless column. Sometimes I do approach a thing from a conceptual point, whether it’s transforming the materials or constructing something. It’s a constant battle with the materials but it always starts with gathering and letting the pieces sit in my studio and then eventually they come together … I’m caught in the space in between so I behave as a filter of sorts. There’s some element of beauty and an object that has a history, that’s part of a person’s life. Not specifically the coke can but most of the other objects were discarded. I’m paying homage to what they were so people will see this strange discarded object as something a little more beautiful. You’ve kind of inherited the Ready Made school? It is in my psyche. The way they handled the materials and treated them. I guess you could consider it more of a low-brow art. I feel if the artist’s hand is visible in the piece and it’s not something that’s super polished or manufactured or mass produced that a person will feel more inclined to approach it. People are fallible and that needs to come through in the art. I’m trying to allow my personality to naturally come through the piece without clobbering people over the head with it. [On the Anchor] I had a dream after losing a friend not physically but spiritually…. I dreamt there were all of these anchors floating, coming out from the water, it’s kind of like, to borrow a [Milan Kundera] title, the incredible lightness of being, this weight was being lifted off me.
CREATIVE SUGAR Winter 2012 9