Joe Sinness received his BA in Studio Art and English Literature from St. John’s University and his MFA in Studio Art from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD). Sinness’s work has been widely exhibited around Minnesota and in 2014 he will have his first international solo show in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Joe is the 2013 recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board and a 2013 McKnight Visual Arts Fellow.  

Through careful acts of arrangement in still lifes, I fetishize and recreate a commodity of my subjects. I rely on the plasticity of object meanings and personae to construct mythologies, or narratives of desire. Although my completed works are drawings, I take on directorial roles, literally, by casting and arranging objects in still life theaters, and metaphorically, by staging melancholic tributes to queer performance.

The ‘Shining Indiscretions’ triptych was created as a physical still life and was lovingly drawn in Colored Pencil. These figures were inspired by the life of Tennessee Williams. Gold lamé and colored lights are used to denote fabulous spirits who exist on the border of the sacred and the profane.