SIKE! is a presentation of new work by American artist Joseph Sherman. The exhibition features collages, encaustic paintings, and a sculptural piece. Together, the artworks reflect Joseph’s current interests in repetition, labor, and materiality. This collective body of work was produced during his 2025–26 artist residency with DMST Atelier in Los Angeles.
The exhibition’s title comes from the slang word “sike,” commonly used during Joseph’s childhood growing up in Illinois. It’s something said immediately after making a statement to take it back at the last second. An expectation is established, then undone. This exhibition adopts the word not just as a title but as a way of thinking about how the work is seen. SIKE! sets up moments of belief that are later reversed through closer looking and interaction with the works
The first body of work featured in SIKE! consists of collages built from yearbook photographs sourced from local schools in Los Angeles, alongside a single yearbook from Bloom Trail High School, which both of Joseph’s parents attended. Here, Joseph continues his ongoing engagement with appropriated imagery where his interests are anchored on the assumed flatness of photographs and the way images are often read as fixed, surface-level objects, both visually and materially. Beginning with the rigid order of the yearbook, Joseph treats the grid not as a neutral organizer but as a material to be handled, disrupted, and rebuilt. By cutting into and reworking that grid, the photograph is pushed beyond representation and begins to register as an object with depth, weight, and structure. What appears orderly at first slowly gives way to instability, asking the viewer to reconsider how images are read and how meaning is constructed through repetition and form.
During his residency with DMST, Joseph began working in encaustic, an ancient process that prioritizes improvisation, attunement, and endurance. The paintings begin from familiar structures such as sport architecture, court markings, and numbering systems.Through repeated layering and fusing of pigmented wax under heat, these forms gradually transform into new realities that remain dependent on their origins while moving away from them. The works are deliberately small in size. At this scale, the paintings produce a slow spectacle, shifting attention from immediate impact toward accumulation, depth, and time within the shared space of the densely populated collages. In these spontaneous and impulsive encaustics, Joseph shapes and fuses layers of pigmented wax until an image emerges through sustained engagement with the encaustic medium.
Joseph’s conceptual Venn diagram of athletic culture and fine art is visible in SIKE! and serves as an organizing principle for the exhibition. This relationship is epitomized in Single File Line, a narrow, eight-foot-long collage that functions as Joseph’s formal ode to Robert Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print and Michael Jordan’s iconic 1987 Wingspan poster. The length of the work references the wingspan of professional basketball player Victor Wembanyama, a measurement that has become a point of contemporary fascination. Throughout the exhibition, sport appears not as subject matter but as a parallel structure of repetition, pace, and calibration.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding this exhibition, please email us at Hello@dmstatelier.com
