What if you saw photographs that were intertwined? How might the pictures change?

Rochelle Voyles’ solo exhibition entitled Unreliable Narrators, currently up at 81 Leonard Gallery in Tribeca, investigates this unique premise. Voyles, born in Toledo Ohio, brings a forceful work ethic to every question she explores. Acquaintances will know that she is an intimidatingly skilled craftsperson, her studio practice benefitting from a confidence earned through years of high-end production and fabrication work. In this expansive solo show, the viewer is met with Voyles’ fully formed and powerful thesis: that salvaged imagery can communicate extensively about the time in which it was made, and that this imagery can be recontextualized, by virtue of the collector and maker, into fresh investigations of socio-historical conventions and their pervasive consequences.

Displayed in the gallery’s elegant outward-facing window, Defense and Entrapment is made, like most works in the show, out of collage, paper, and wood. This materials list sounds deceptively simple, but a close look at any of Voyles’ works demonstrates the complexity of her project. Take Defense and Entrapment – there are eight seemingly near-identical shapes installed with horizontal and vertical symmetry. All of Voyles’ larger works in Unreliable Narrators are shaped like threads in embroidery diagrams, but not all of these forms articulate the same meanings. In Defense and Entrapment, these shapes frame collaged photographs of military jets, black-and-white photographs of soldiers, and threatening angles of “defense” architecture. In other works, Voyles’ oversized thread substrates relate to organic movements of snakes, bugs, or the swirling insides of mammals. But Defense and Entrapment is neither organic nor biomorphic – it’s as if the threads have been forced into military step, communicating mechanized obedience over the anarchy of organic anatomy and nature.

In sharp contrast to the distillation of militaristic aesthetics in Defense and Entrapment, Neptune in Pisces, a smaller work by the entrance of the gallery, evokes the carefree curliness of a hastily-scrawled bar tab signature. Neptune in Pisces is a great specimen to focus on in order to engross oneself in Voyles’ masterful collage logic. The sky blue behind a flock of flying birds is Exacto-bladed into the edge of a photo of deep water, while two rhyming but different crops of water with sunlight glinting on its gentle peaks are separated by some, but not all, of an unidentifiable piece of infrastructure– maybe a piece of a bridge, or an oil rig. A missile or rocket blasts off in one of the right-side loops, reminding us that manmade projectiles tear through the sensitive ecology of Earth, leaving devastation and chemtrails in their wake.

Read the full article: 

https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/voyles-at-81-leonard-gallery/7676