Joy Episalla & Carrie Yamaoka
The leaden circles dissolved in the air
New York, 1329 Willoughby Avenue, 2A, Brooklyn
The leaden circles dissolved in the air, a two-person exhibition featuring work by Joy Episalla and Carrie Yamaoka. This is the first exhibition pairing the work of these two artists, who have collaborated as part of a larger collective, and lived together as a couple for over forty years.
The title is taken from a refrain in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, pointing to time and its passage. For both Episalla and Yamaoka, time is porous and elastic, and material is mutable and malleable. Memory, movement, and the viewers’ perception and experience of the work are essential to both of their practices.
Moving away from representation, Episalla pushes photography and video towards sculptural abstraction. Her recent foldtograms (folded photograms) record her performative actions and build on her prior efforts to delineate time. By removing the camera itself, and breaking with established darkroom practices, she challenges assumptions about what a photograph is. Transforming a static two-dimensional photographic image into a sculptural object reveals the artist’s interaction with the material and her focus on the possible metamorphosis of the photographic surface. Yamaoka’s work is concerned with visibility and the immediacy of perception. Through experimentation with surface, scale, light, and the way materials behave and misbehave, Yamaoka challenges the viewer’s sense of self, sight, and site, as they navigate objects that morph as surrounding conditions change.
The leaden circles dissolved in the air features a new collaborative installation day for night, created for this exhibition, highlighting the duo’s longtime proximity to each other.
