Joy Episalla
recent work
october 2-28

 

opening reception: friday october 6, 5:30 - 7:00 pm
For the past several years Joy Episalla's working process has led her to focus on investigating the zone between photography and sculpture. The critic and curator Bill Arning has written: "Joy Episalla takes photographs of things that are inconsequential, unlovely and just plain boring. But by approaching them with the fixated attention of a forensic examiner, she imbues these calculated mundanities with a hush wonder. Her subjects are details of domestic interiors that show wear, each smudge evincing past occupants and lost times.

cushion #3

c-print mounted to plexiglass, 39" x 63" x 1/2", edition of 3, 2000.

Often her viewpoint is so close to the subject that the large-scale color photos slip gently over the border into abstraction, an especially pronounced effect in those works Episalla physically "dissects. "The novelist Michael Cunningham has written of Episalla's work: "I think of Episalla's photographs as charting a line between the domestic and the profound. Their depths emerge as I look longer. The pillows are mounted on panels that don't quite match up; the curtains are treated simultaneously as recognizable curtains and as abstractions composed of color, texture, shadow. Stitches, spots and stains often figure prominently, and they are always ravishing. The joinings and the accidents are every bit as beautiful as the objects' more legible attempts to be perfect versions of themselves." Joy Episalla lives and works in New York City.

pillow #2

c-print mounted to plexiglass, (tryptich) 40" x 59" x 1/2" each panel, edition of 3, 1999.

 

 

 

 
 
Her work has been exhibited in the United States, at Hallwalls, Buffalo, New York; New Langton Arts, San Francisco; the Newark Museum, New Jersey and in New York City at White Columns and Debs & Co. In Europe venues include Germany at Neue Galerie/Interaktion Kunst in Hannover and the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein in Aachen; in London at London Artforms and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In addition to her art work, she has been a longtime AIDS activist and was a member of fierce pussy, a New York-based lesbian public art collective active in the early '90s. Her previous solo exhibitions include Debs & Co., New York, September 1999 and most recently at Mercer Union, Toronto, Canada, March 2000.

handbag #6

c-print mounted to plexiglass, 33" x 32" x 1/2", edition of 3, 2000.

 

carpet #2

c-print mounted to plexiglass, 33" x 32" x 1/2", edition of 3, 2000.