@jmmetranoart

Joe(y) / Joseph / Joseph Metrano / 
Joseph Matthew Metrano

As idiosyncratic as it is historic, New England is defined less by geographic boundaries than by its characteristic commingling of old and new. Physical remnants of the past, and pressures to preserve them, here enmesh what to most would be history with what to the Yankee is modern life and the spirit of the Old World commingles with the New to form a cultural landscape that vainly looks to its forebears from across a vast sea.

Defined just as much by its dying malls with pothole-riddled parking lots as by the dry-laid stone walls that cut through its lowland forests, the protean landscape of my upbringing is embodied within the logic of my practice by the resourceful employment of endemic material. Objects specific in their ubiquity and ubiquitous in their specificity have an unrivaled capacity to complicate memory, and it is in presenting them, comme ça, that the otherwise linear passage of time is folded on itself, to the point that it all too often becomes entangled. Such unassuming baubles as wooden nickels, wicker baskets, candy buttons, and plastic Easter eggs therefore serve to trouble conventional notions of authenticity, while fabrication, collection, and wordplay—all used in equal part to manipulate the readymade—make apparent the inevitable intrusion of memory on physicality. It is through this multifaceted and decidedly introspective process that I strive to draw critical discourse away from the object itself and toward the oft-overlooked facets of being, whose sole commonality is that they are shared exclusively by those that call any one place home. 


There’s Scissors in the Hutch (detail), 2024. 
Heirloom apple peels cast in resin and mounted in applewood frames, dimensions variable.

Gumball Machine, 2024. 
Used gumball machine purchased in Manchester, New Hampshire, through Facebook Marketplace transaction with green 1-inch gumballs, 40 × 12 × 12 in.

Not the Teeth, 2025.
2,982 (give or take) candy buttons on paper, 1 ⅞ × 701 in.

Thirty-four Baskets, 2024.
Baskets, dimensions variable.