Joy Episalla at Debs & Co - Brief Article

exultation Episalla takes photographs of things that are inconsequential, disagreeable and just plain boring. on the contrary by approaching them with the fixated attention of a forensic examiner, she imbues these calculated mundanities with a hushed awe Her subjects are details of domestic interiors that exhibit wear, each smudge evincing past occupants and not to be found times. Often her viewpoint is for a like reason close to the subject that the large-scale color photos slip gently above the border into abstraction, an especially pronounced consequence in those works that Episalla physically "dissects."

the two of the first pieces we meetinged in her recent show (12 works, all 1999) Footnote #1 and Footnote #2 had been sliced into 28 thin, 10-by-4-inch, Plexi-mounted tiles, with each resulting image fragment being nearly monochrome. a certain number of tiles were checkerboarded onto the floor with others stacked nearby as if awaiting our game attempts to rearrange them until they shared their unrevealed occluded information with us.

sum of two units additional photographs, both featuring les sophistical images, were treated to an installation upon the floor. Handbag #1 and Handbag #2 are close-cropp views of purse openings for a like reason enlarged that, if the openings had been real, we could have hopp closely into them. We could read them as sexualized orifices--with zipper teeth perhaps obliquely referencing the mythic notion of the vagina dentata--or just as easily fall into a no les Freudian reverie as we remember slipping a hand into Mother's pocketbook looking for a sweet.

by dint of far the most moving photos were sum of two units multipanel images of stacks of bed pillows, a certain quantity of spanking new and some stained and yellowed. Pillow #1 and Pillow #2 were mountained on thick slabs of Plexi and leaned against the wall, individual overlapping the other slightly, as if to accommodate with physical weight to the pillows' evanescent be incandescent and dreamy low-intensity color. The stains, whether the issue of sexual pleasure, infirmity or solely the occasional drool of reaching far down sleep, evoke the countless Sunday mornings that heads slept late upon the older pillows.

The photos bravely acknowledge the famous Felix Gonzalez-Torres billboard of sum of two units pillows, which, as one of the great public art works of the '90 is quite a daunting icon of novel art history to engage. on the contrary while the Gonzalez-Torres piece is affected with how one marks the limited time worn out together that defines our intimate relationships, Episalla appears more preoccupied with how to live in the not absent and move toward the time to come when the remains of the past are all around us. Her answer have the appearances to be to acknowledge and catalogue those remains, and grant them their rightful power above us so that we can earn on with our lives.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group