Conflicting Truths: Works by Melissa Joseph — curatorial project at the List Gallery

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Featuring: Melissa Joseph

Curated by: Tess Wei

View exhibition catalog here

Conflicting Truths brings together numerous wall-mounted and sculptural forms that prioritize intimacy in scale, irregular edges, and softness of image. Mining her family’s photographic archive as the starting point for her subjects and scenes, Joseph translates these family snapshots through a range of processes, including: altering textiles through wet- and needle-felting, combining stoneware through inlaying, and forming delicate, linen surfaces through paper-making. What unites all of these processes is the use of friction and pressure to transform highly malleable materials into relatively taut forms: repetitively rubbing strands of wool in a soap-and-water mixture to interlace the fibers; flattening clay bodies of differing colors with a rolling pin to create continuous ceramic surfaces; and pouring and dripping linen pulp onto a screen to form an integrated sheet of paper.

Raised in rural Pennsylvania by her father, a surgeon who emigrated from Kerala, India, and her American mother, the artist’s multicultural background is an integral theme throughout her practice. In basing her subjects and settings on family photographs, some works feature her late father and other relatives of Malayali heritage living in India, while other pieces include various maternal family members and moments from Joseph's own childhood. Through material translations of this personal archive, Joseph forms a new architecture of interpretation wherein her visual language oscillates between soft and firm, natural and industrial, remembered and imagined. In shifting between these materials, methods, and influences, the works in Conflicting Truths articulate Joseph's own family history, while offering space to more broadly consider how identity is formed and reformed by fluctuating relationships to space, memory, and ideas of belonging. 

Curated by: Tess Wei

Featuring: Connie Yu, Lucia Garzón,  Mo Fernanda Nuñez, FORTUNE, Nickie Sigurdsson, Kristina Stallvik, Serena Hocharoen

This exhibition highlights the intersection of makers who engage with cooking and food as sites of cultural production and preservation. Of particular focus, is the way in which these visual and culinary artists engage with printed, digital, and alternative formats to represent processes, recipes, menus, and meals shared.

Food (here broadly, edible matter intended for nourishment, community-making, and storytelling) participates in a constant process of transformation from planting and harvesting to preparing and eating. Therefore, the ways in which edible matter and its related rituals are documented, shared, and (re)interpreted become essential appendages to food, whose physical form is otherwise ephemeral. Through processes ranging from risograph printing to the gradual rehydration of silk handkerchiefs, a thing shared offers snow fungus (Tremella fuciformis), natural remedies, porski (cod), garlic shells, and more.

The works presented in this exhibition have differing intentions, existing as: archives for personal and communal memories; prompts for others to engage in similar creative acts (in the way recipes are more step-by-step suggestions than instruction manuals); invitations to congregate at the table, so to speak; and bodies of research to sustain traditions of food growing, preparing, and partaking.