Joel Stoehr: Tower of Babel, 2007
Working with laser cut museum board and materials typical to architectural model making, Joel Stoehr has created a sculpture inspired by New York City entitled "Tower of Babel". In this work, Stoehr re-imagines the city as an all encompassing, infinitely expanding tower, unable to be parsed into particular neighborhoods or boroughs. Within the work, the notion of control over one's physical and psychological proximity to the architecture, and the inhabitants of that architecture, is lost. The collective unconscious of the city is transformed into an anonymous crushing urban overload.
Stoehr's drawings and sculptures of the past two years have envisioned architecture and urban space, particularly New York City, as an imposition or weight that bears down upon humanity. In order to separate the structure of the city from the industry of the individual, the city's monolithic projection becomes a model. Stoehr lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
