Joe Cimino is a time-based media artist whose work investigates what familiar materials and nostalgic feelings reveal about human perception, and the role they play in determining what goes unnoticed. Utilizing historical evidence harmonized with intuitive sensing, he questions how stories lost to time can be conjured back into existence.
Cimino’s exhibition at Saint Kate hinges on the challenge and potential of capturing the ephemeral through everyday occurrences and the visual constant of light. For instance, the central work When Light Takes Form is a film reminiscent of the familiar documentary format that reveals the memories embedded in a home shown by light taking form in a contained space.
Through audiovisual and time-based media, Cimino brings the background to the foreground; he suggests that giving form to something as ephemeral as light offers a means of encapsulating other things in our shared and personal histories that remain on the periphery.
