Josh Winegar: Future Monuments

Future Monuments is a series of highly constructed photographic prints that manipulate historic sculptures and monuments in ways that are at times brutal, grotesque, sensual, fragmented, abject, and alluring. By twisting, manipulating, and altering historic forms, Winegar creates new amalgamations of monumentality not as a way to celebrate a historic past, but rather, to capture the violence, fragility, and complicated nature of the world in the 21^st century.  These are photographic monuments to a world filled with mass violence, consumer excess, emotional and social fragmentation, racial injustice, ecological breakdown, and political unrest.

By including broken fragments from empires and past civilizations fallen into ruin, Winegar’s quiet black and white works also seem to function as a cautionary tale and a memento mori.

This evocation of mortality and historical collapse resonates deeply today, in a time when societies are reckoning with the monuments of their past—questioning what and who we choose to commemorate—Future Monuments also asks the viewer to consider monuments build or dismantle today. Far from neutral, monuments are fraught because they set aside a moment as historic and while looking at the past, they suggest values of the present.

Rather than presenting straightforward critiques or didactic narratives, the series inhabits a liminal space between caution and optimism. The photographs invite viewers to speculate: are these ruins remnants of fallen civilization? Or perhaps torn-down monuments became discarded relics laying in ruin that serve as reminders of where we have evolved from?