Editors’ Selects: March 2026

by Aliya Nimmons, IMPULSE Magazine
March 15, 2026

Rochelle Voyles’s Defense and Entrapment (2026) immediately signals an exhibition that refuses to play it safe. Drawing from her background in carpentry and a sustained interest in textiles, artist Rochelle Voyles’s solo exhibition Unreliable Narrators examines the friction within personal memory and collective history. Photographs are estranged from their original context; Voyles reclaims their stories through cutting, assembling, and reconfiguration. Archival images manipulated in this way circulate as deteriorating cultural tropes, revealing systems of oppression and the reconstructed stories left in their wake.

For Voyles, each jigsaw-cut sculpture describes a fragment of reality and the human experience. Hand-cut silhouettes interlock across the surface, painted borders bleed into the photographs, and a thin varnish gives a subtle sheen to the surfaces. As each sculpture takes shape, it informs the collage, and the piece becomes the narrative. Voyles threads these experiences with disorder, cultural erasure, and war, evaluating both inherited conclusions and open-ended desires.

While some interlocking shapes read as ties, linking her thought systems, others manifest as roots that ground the imagery, communicating from one piece to another. Smaller remnant sculptures emerge from their larger counterparts, shaped from scraps that fall after being hand-cut. These smaller forms become lost stories—pieces no longer active in the larger composition, but meaningful in their fragmented, amalgamated state.

Voyles’s objects possess a fluid, malleable quality, appearing to stretch and unravel. Viewers are asked to excavate their own realities from the visual records they inherit. At times, this work feels like a simulation, where colonized worlds and biased histories complicate recognition of the alternate realities we presume to know.

The two-part blue and orange collage analyzes masculine and feminine stereotypes through cowboy Americana imagery—archetypes built on erasing other races from alternative subcultures. Cropped images of cowboys, rodeo gestures, car interiors, and herding cows collide with fragments of domestic imagery, creating tension between rugged masculinity and its constructed counterpart. The edges of the sculptures are painted, elongating the stretch of memory and the act of partial recall. Voyles gives the works a film-like quality through jump cuts, allowing moments to shift rapidly while maintaining the sequence and momentum.

By portioning and repositioning visual records, Voyles shows how images, like the continuum of memory, can become layered and reinterpreted over time. The work asks viewers to confront contradictions embedded in narratives that rarely resolve into coherence. Voyles’s works leave viewers suspended between past and present, memory and perception, revealing the fragility of consciousness.