JOY EPISALLA
bookcase (portrait of FM)
Digital print on vinyl mesh
7.5 feet H x 11.5 feet W
2002
Joy Episalla at Carrie Secrist Gallery
March 24 — April 22 2006 [more images]Carrie Secrist Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent work by New York artist Joy Episalla. She will present a series of works derived from books and bookcases in the large gallery. In the smaller second gallery, she will show a video work called for the birds.
Joy Episalla works in the interstices between photography, video and sculpture. Her work focuses on the wealth of information that mundane architecture or an object can provide. Like a forensic examiner or palm reader, she considers the cracks and stains inscribed on the surface—the secret histories of places and things. Working serially and intervening in the image as editor, Episalla spies, observes and sometimes re-arranges—takes the image apart and rebuilds it—manipulating the recorded moment.
JOY EPISALLA
fragment no. 4 (brown)
Chromogenic Print mounted on Plexiglas
14.5" W x 18" H
2006Her scrutiny of various groupings of books, and the particular way people have arranged them, forms the nucleus of this show. Various situations encountered include: the books of lovers newly co-habitating in a sublet apartment; the bookcase of a close friend left (almost) exactly as it was at his death; a psychoanalyst's well-worn collection of The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud encapsulated, as a free-standing sculpture/object.
In the hall to the second gallery, images of ivy and lawn chairs line the walls, with an accompanying cacophony of chirping birds--inviting the viewer into a virtual ivy maze called for the birds. The walls come to life as slightly larger-than-life ivy leaves placidly float against the brick walls of a garden. Within a few moments, the ivy bursts into activity with the chirping, humming, flittering and flocking of the avian ivy-dwellers within their vegetal apartment video projection.
Joy Episalla's work has been exhibited in the US and internationally including the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio; Debs & Co., New York; The Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans; The Phoenix Art Museum; ARCO, Madrid; Aeroplastics Contemporary, Brussels, and at Studio 1.1 in London. She is a 2003 recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. Most recently she has co-curated out of the blue, an exhibition about weather and the creative process, with the artist Joy Garnett, running concurrently at the Abington Art Center in Jenkintown, PA.
