Culture
The NYC Artist Excavating ‘Alternative Facts’
Joe Bochynski’s fake archaeology challenges viewers to figure out what’s believable and what’s not.
Joe Bochynski often canvasses construction sites. He scopes out the rubble in pursuit of chunks that look dusty or scraped up, then stuffs the fragments into a hulking bag with reinforced seams. It’s important that the pieces have the patina of age: that’s key to the deception.
Bochynski, an artist, masquerades as the director of the fictitious NYC Department of Archaeology (DoA). He uses the fragments as bases for mosaics, which he then pairs with records professing that they’re objects unearthed from dig sites around the city.