{"id":93871,"date":"2025-06-28T07:38:06","date_gmt":"2025-06-28T14:38:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=93871"},"modified":"2025-07-21T08:21:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T15:21:07","slug":"josh-winegar-explores-the-lies-photographs-tell-and-the-truths-they-can-render","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/josh-winegar-explores-the-lies-photographs-tell-and-the-truths-they-can-render\/","title":{"rendered":"Josh Winegar Explores The Lies Photographs Tell and the Truths They Can Render"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Installation<\/p>\n

Josh Winegar\u2019s<\/a> Future Monuments<\/em>, currently in the Projects Gallery at UMOCA (behind the gift shop, which the gallery doesn\u2019t employ as an exit) includes 12 untitled, heavily manipulated, black-and-white composite photographs assembled from, among other things, photos of carved stone sculptures (presumably originating from monuments).\u00a0 Winegar has gone far beyond clumsy cutting and pasting, not only using the latest in digital processes to camouflage the seams, but apparently using the visual qualities of one file to control how those of another are employed, so that shapes and textures are swapped among them. Two of the many meanings of \u201crender,\u201d including \u201cto draw\u201d and \u201cto melt down,\u201d are neatly conflated: some of what seemingly began as stone has instead been \u201crendered\u201d as biological matter, possibly raw meat, merging the two so that the immediacy of flesh is made durable as marble.<\/h4>\n

Several details are clever, even witty, though the subject matter may preclude some viewers from appreciating the humor. On at least two figures, plastic bags printed with labels or diagrams and including paper labels have been superimposed, making another parallel, this one between the butchery that is usually only implied in a monument and today\u2019s retail butcher shop, with its sanitary facade. In another, sockets for flag poles seem to anticipate the future use of heroes as political arguments. In perhaps the most devious instances, the iron reinforcing bars used to repair broken stones are exposed like the shattered bones of warriors.<\/h4>\n

During its first century of spectacular growth and establishment (ca. 1850\u20131950), photography was celebrated for its powerful capacity for telling truth. Now, three-quarters of the way through its second century, a cascade of fictional devices that include, but are by no means limited to, physical manipulation, mislabeling, digitalizing, Photoshop, CGI, and most recently AI, have given the photographic image a very different power: the ability to lie that is so complete as to undermine the audience\u2019s confidence in even the most pure and sincere previous examples.<\/h4>\n