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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. Thanks for being with us today as we bring you conversations about some of the great art shows you can catch in our area this season. 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 or in paints on canvas, but in textiles, particularly felt.

Some of the images are small, really tiny, and some are large multi-paneled works, but they all act on two levels. First, as the image of what they're depicting. A family elder doting on children, or a group of young women in a bedroom getting ready with curlers and stockings. These images literally jump out of the surfaces. The felt gives them dimension and a sense of being more than just 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. The show is called Irish Exit. Artist Melissa Joseph joined me to talk about it, and I started by asking what it is she enjoys about working with 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 important for me at that time, and I really dug into working with the material during that time.

Alison Stewart: What did you learn about working with felt that you didn't know before?

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 it's 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 like 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's feels like home. It feels like where I am supposed to be and where I came from. I think any 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 are 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 in terms 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. 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.

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 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.

Melissa Joseph: Oh, thank you.

Alison Stewart: I think it's beyond recycling.

Melissa Joseph: 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. He was saying just 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 this feeling. Sometimes, the feeling is 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. 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 the art really gives me an opportunity to sit with that and to engage with that.

Alison Stewart: My guest, 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: Okay. Owen is my nephew. He's two years old. [chuckles] 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 like a standpipe or a holder that is found by someone I collaborate with. I call him my rust guy, but his name is Jeff Adelberg 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. 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. A diameter, would you say that?

Melissa Joseph: I would say maybe 4 inches across or 3 1/2, 4 inches across. That's something that's magic about felt too. I painted for most of my life. 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 be make or break a likeness or or a sentiment.

It's an interesting conversation you're having with the material as you go. That one, 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 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. 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. 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." [laughs]

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. 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. It's because I'm from-- I wasn't actually there.

Alison Stewart: So interesting.

Melissa Joseph: 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 on the show, which one would it be?

Melissa Joseph: My favorite work in the show is called Kadankavil 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 too weird. It's just 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 recognize 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. 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. Well, we chose the grays. 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 Baez of REGULARNORMAL. They decided to team up and 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, they 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, from their UV. The UV glass protects the color and then also from pests, moths, et cetera. It's an important thing to have them contained in that way. Sometimes, frames can take away so much from the work. 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. Also, it's just a saying from where I come from, and it's a way to think about how we can move through space quietly.

Alison Stewart: That was Brooklyn-based textile artist, Melissa Joseph, whose work is on view at the Margot Samel Gallery at 295 Church Street where you can catch the show until November 22nd. You are listening to All Of It. We'll have another hour of art shows coming up, including a new exhibit at the MET featuring the art of friends and rivals, Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas. Plus hear about the first Black artists who have a solo exhibition at The Frick, Barkley L. Hendricks. That is all coming up on All Of It after the news.

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