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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Now let's talk about some local art from a local artist named Melissa Joseph. Her work explores the lives and labors of women of color, inspired largely by her own archive of family photos and rendered, not on glossy photo paper and paints or canvas, but in textile, particularly felt. Some of the images are small, but they all act on two levels as the image of what they're depicting. A family elder dotting on the children, a vanity mirror reflecting clothes, torsos at odd angles.

Then there are also these big multi-panel works like a group of young women in a bedroom getting ready for something and curlers and stockings. These images literally jump out of the surfaces. The felt gives them dimension and a sense of being more than images but objects in their own right, something the artist calls a sense of presence or thingness. The work is on view at the Margot Samel Gallery at 295 Church Street, where you can catch it until November 22nd. Artist Melissa Joseph joins me now to talk about the show, which is called Irish Exit. Welcome to the studio.

Melissa Joseph: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: What do you like about the process of working with textiles and specifically felt?

Melissa Joseph: I discovered felt during the pandemic. I had been trained as a textile designer in my 20s and worked mostly with print media. I think maybe especially because of the pandemic and being isolated and not able to be around people, there was something about the softness of the felt that was really, really important for me at that time. I really dug into working with the material during that time.

Alison Stewart: What did you learn about working with felt-

Melissa Joseph: It's so funny--

Alison Stewart: -if you didn't know it before?

[laughter]

Melissa Joseph: The truth is I didn't know a lot about it at all. It's an interesting place in textiles where it's really relegated to traditional and craft realms. Even being trained in textiles, I didn't learn it in school. It's starting to have more space in these fine art conversations now, but really, a lot of people don't know about felt. They don't understand how it's made. I spend a lot of time when people come into the studio or see the work just talking about how it's made, which is actually very intuitive and very fun and cathartic.

Well, wet felt is the oldest textile that we have. You use wool and you rub it together with water and some soap, and it will lock together. The fibers will lock together. The needle felting that I do mostly now is a newer process and it just involves using a needle and stabbing the surface and the felt will embed itself into whatever you're using.

Alison Stewart: What does it feel like to work with it?

Melissa Joseph: It's so funny. It feels like home. It feels like where I am supposed to be and where I came from. I think any sort of textile is going to speak to the body because that's what we do with them mostly. As soon as you see a textile, you can immediately relate to it on the level of your physical self.

I think because my work is interested in talking about how we move through space and how our bodies impact the way that we're permitted to move through space, then this idea of a fabric and this interface of body and fabric as a protector, as a decorator, as a function, those things all become embedded in any work that uses that material no matter what you're doing with it.

Alison Stewart: One thing I thought was [unintelligible 00:03:46] to the show, and when you get close, it looks one way, and then when you pull far back, it looks different. They're the same. You understand that it's the same work, but where you stand really makes a difference with the work.

Melissa Joseph: Yes, because when you get really close, you can really see those individual fibers and maybe then you can even take yourself to the place of the animal where the fiber came from and then you're getting into this completely different conversation. If you've done meditation and meditative eating and you think about this raisin, and then where did this raisin come from? Not just where did it grow, but the truck and the people, everybody, the hands that have touched it.

That kind of thinking is embedded into-- I think ancestry is a big part of why I use these images from my family photo archive. I'm actually curious knowing that you wrote the book about stuff and junk-

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Melissa Joseph: -how you felt about seeing the way that I'm using some of these cast-off and discarded objects in conjunction with the felt.

Alison Stewart: I just love the idea of something coming from an object that contains memory, because it's a hard thing is for people when they don't want to throw something away, it's because they don't want to throw away the memory. How great would it be to have the memory become part of something else? I love that idea. I think it's beyond recycling.

Melissa Joseph: Yes. Thank you. I'm so happy to hear you say that. I feel that too. I was talking to a friend of mine named Jacob before this broadcast, and he was saying just that, that I can't say in words always what I can do with the material. I can't articulate always perfectly why there's just sort of this feeling. Sometimes the feeling is that it's that memory or that story that I just feel, I see it or I recognize it.

It's like recognizing the humanity and the people who had those objects and in the animals. I've been vegetarian now for 30-some years, and I think that I do have this very, very deep empathy for living beings. That doesn't make me unique. I think a lot of people have that, but I have not necessarily-- the art really gives me an opportunity to sit with that and to engage with that.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Melissa Joseph. The name of the show is Irish Exit. It's at the Margot Samel Gallery at 295 Church Street. Let's talk about a couple of pieces. There's a work called Owen, which is in two different images set inside a double-circle frame. Tell me about Owen.

Melissa Joseph: Owen is my nephew. He's two years old. A lot of my work includes images of my niece, especially because when I was felting, Owen wasn't born yet. This is one of the first works that I've actually done with my nephew. That object is a standpipe or a holder that was found by someone I collaborate with. I call him my rust guy, but his name is Jeff [unintelligible 00:06:49] and he lives in Massachusetts. His Instagram is how I found a lot of the objects that I work with because I don't have time to go and be picking at flea markets and stuff anymore.

The whole show I understood to be about furniture. As I was selecting images for the show, which I do intuitively, they had images of furniture in them. There was always a character that was a piece of furniture in almost every piece. That was from a series of images of Owen moving around on this chair in the front yard. I knew I had the two openings where I could put images. I thought of it almost like a reel or like a Muybridge showing different moments in time almost like a video. I thought that that would be-- Those little ones are tricky because you don't have a lot of space to make moves.

Alison Stewart: They're small. I want to let people know they're really small. What diameter would you say that [crosstalk]?

Melissa Joseph: Yes. I would say maybe like four inches across or three and a half, four inches across. That's something that's magic about felt too. I painted for most of my life, and I don't have the same facility with paint to scale up and down the way that I do with felt. Somehow the materiality of the felt itself can scale in ways that inherently make it interesting, or at least I can understand how to do that.

In those little pieces, one hair, one fiber can make or break a likeness or a sentiment. It's an interesting conversation you're having with the material as you go. I'm thrilled that he's here in the world with us. My brother and his wife were trying for a long time to have a second child and he finally came to us as a little miracle. I just wanted to include him in our story.

Alison Stewart: Then there's the two-panel piece I mentioned of the girls, young women getting ready in bed. There's curlers and someone's putting on stockings. Where is that image from?

Melissa Joseph: Oh my gosh, that one I love. That's actually from a slide that was digitized by my uncle. It's my mom's first wedding. My mom got married when she was in her 20s. The young girl with the-- is my mom's in the curlers. They're getting ready for her wedding and she's putting stockings on her youngest sister who's 16 years younger than her, who's probably about eight at the time.

There was another woman in that photograph, and I didn't know who it was. I asked my mom and she didn't even remember. My mom's like, "I wonder whose wedding that was." [laughter] Our aunt, Peg, is the family historian, and she was able to remember it was a friend from college that was visiting. Since that person wasn't someone who I really had a connection with, I decided to remove her, and I took a photo of myself in the same position, in the same clothes.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Melissa Joseph: I put myself in that space, which is a new departure for me. I haven't done that before. I didn't want to make it a false image where I was actually there, so I separated them in the plane so they're actually framed separately as a diptych. It's a departure. It's a new way of working.

Alison Stewart: Oh, so the separation is because of you?

Melissa Joseph: Yes. I wasn't actually there, so I wanted to conjecture about what it would be like to be there, but I didn't want to actually create that fantasy that I was there.

Alison Stewart: If you wanted people to spend an extra 10 seconds in front of one piece in the show, which one would it be?

Melissa Joseph: My favorite work in the show is called [unintelligible 00:10:31] Fish. It's about an aquarium. It's in the back on the right side. That piece is really important to me because it's so uniquely of my family. My uncle taped a family photo to the back of the fish tank, and it was such a weird-- It's just such a strange thing to do. It embodies what so much makes these things so special and unique is that only he would do that thing, and somehow, I recognized the singularity of that act in that moment, even though the photo wasn't that great, it can still make a really beautiful artwork because it's capturing the essence of their being.

Alison Stewart: Do you think you'll continue to work with felt?

Melissa Joseph: Oh my gosh, yes. Felt is like I was a felter in a past life or a sheep or something. Felt is for me forever.

Alison Stewart: Before I let you go, the framing is interesting. I think it feels like it is part of the artwork.

Melissa Joseph: Yes, we chose the gray. I want to just take a moment to thank Margot Samel for inviting me to do the show and giving me the opportunity to create this vision. She worked with Danny Báez of Regular Normal. They decided to team up and allow me to have this opportunity to make this exhibition, and I'm so grateful for it because it's been a dream come true. I love the idea of gray frames, but it's not always possible because it's more complicated, it's more work. You have to paint them.

You saying that, makes it clear to me that it's worth the extra effort. Because they're textiles, framing is important. It protects them from dust. The UV glass protects the color and then also from pests, moths, et cetera, so it's an important thing to have them contained in that way. Sometimes frames can take away so much from the work, and so by finding this way of doing it where they feel like they're living in this home that is of them, that was the goal, and it's really nice to have had the chance to do that and to present the work in this way. I'm glad it read that way for you.

Alison Stewart: The name of the exhibition is Irish Exit because?

Melissa Joseph: Oh, the name is Irish Exit. Oh, a couple of reasons. I am half-Irish. I know it's not always on the forefront of my phenotype here, but also, it's just a saying from where I come from. It's a way to think about how we can move through space quietly.

Alison Stewart: My guest has been Melissa Joseph. The name of the show is Irish Exit, Irish and--

Melissa Joseph: Indian. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: She's beautiful, by the way. Melissa Joseph has been my guest. The name of the show is Irish Exit. It's at the Margot Samel Gallery at 295 Church Street. It's up until November 22nd. Thank you for coming in.

Melissa Joseph: Thank you so much, Alison.

 

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