The Physical Photograph
— Frank Moore, 2001 

The things we touch in daily life, bed pillows for example, change.  They may take on a weariness of stains before we're through with them.  Our rugs faithfully record the positions of furniture, the concealed passage of an extension cord beneath, the abrasions of foot traffic.  There are moments when we see these things, when we "read" them.  Given enough time, enough history, the domestic objects which surround us may become our biography. 

These are the sort of objects Joy Episalla photographs and she imbues them with a distinctive emotional intensity.  She has cited the apartment that Catherine Deneuve inhabits in Roman Polanski's Repulsion as an example of the unsettling effect she seeks in her work. Polanski's film script contains many references to physical details:  walls, a fire grate, suitcases, crumpled sheets, ceilings, doors and door handles, optical distortions on the surface of a teakettle. These familiar things take on a creepy quality accentuating the vulnerability and psychic fragility of the central character, Carol (played by Deneuve). Early in the script Polanski uses simple details to ease us into Carol's state of mind:  

"Now we see what CAROL sees, a small crack on the surface of the wall by an air vent.  But the spectator cannot be certain whether it really exists or is the product of his imagination"  

Later in the film Carol leans against the hallway wall only to find that it has suddenly become soft and clay-like.  Playing with perception is very much a part of Episalla's method as well.  In a large but minimal image (cushion #3, 2000) depicting two buttons and a seam on a well worn piece of leather furniture, she has indicated that she sought to heighten the resemblance of the leather to human skin. Things are never quite what they seem in Episalla's work; and, as in a film, it is through the accumulation of such readings that the larger ambitions of her work emerge.

Picture this: at the far end of a room a series of six overlapping photographic images, each 26"x 39", (radiator #1, 2000), are leaning against the wall. Teeth. A giant set of aqua choppers with fibrous gums seem to bite the floor. In fact the bottom half of each image is a section of a radiator, the upper half a mauve sisal-like woven mat. It is difficult to discern which is in front of the other: there is a near perfect confusion of figure and ground in part because the cropping of the image has removed all the visual clues.  The  modular form of the radiator repeats like Brancusi's endless column laid on its side.  The actual juncture of floor and wall is hidden behind the leaning images, and because the teeth read like a bizarre architectural molding the piece subtly distorts the space in the room.  Up close, one can see that each image is mounted behind a 1/2 inch thick slab of Plexiglas.  The piece has considerable mass.  The edge of the slab diffracts the image, which glimmers and from certain angles appears to be mounted on the face of the slab.  Episalla enhances this effect by cutting away a thin margin of the white plastic material backing the photographic image:  the image thus appears to have no physical thickness and simply becomes fused with the object.

 The physical quality of the work goes hand-in-hand with a minimal pictorial sensibility, and reminds one that Episalla was formally trained as a printmaker and painted for many years. Images are usually cropped and rarely include more than one object. The compositions are frontal and geometric and often evoke references to abstract painting. Her photographs of striped curtains, for example, call to mind the work of Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland and Bridget Riley. But because these are, after all, photographs, there are organic events and textures that are illusionistic and sensual in a photographic sense; and Episalla manipulates hue, saturation and lightness in the darkroom to give these images an effect utterly unlike that of painting. 

She shoots these images with a very high speed film, and then pushes the film to achieve a characteristic grain.  This grain becomes highly visible when a 35mm negative is enlarged to a final print size of 26" x 39".  Seen at a distance her images often appear muted or drab in color, but one has only to approach any work closely and one perceives swirling constellations of these particles of emulsion in an impossible array of colors; vibrant yellow and pink, delicate ultramarine blue and chartreuse. This effect is further enhanced by the pearly, iridescent quality of the photographic paper she uses.  The shift from drab order to sparkling confetti suggests a sense of delight and freedom at the core of Episalla's work. In appropriating the strategies of painting and incorporating them with her photographic practice, Episalla extends a venerable artistic tradition. The renowned 19th century photographer P.H. Emerson, the great champion of Julia Margaret Cameron, founded a school of photography which sought the same artistic freedoms enjoyed by the great painters of his day (he cites Millet and Corot for example). Like the early impressionists he was influenced by discoveries in optics made by scientists like Hermann von Helmholtz.  He sought to free photography from a slavish obsession with evenly sharp focus throughout an image: "For example, the realist, if painting a tree a hundred yards off, would not strive to render the tree as it appears to him from where he is sitting, but he would probably gather leaves of the tree and place them before him, and paint them as they looked within twelve inches of his eyes, and as the Modern Pre-Raphaelites did, he might even imitate the local color of the things themselves.  Whereas the naturalist painter would care for none of these things, he would endeavor to render the impression of the tree taken as it appeared to him standing a hundred yards off, the tree taken as a whole, and as it looked, modified, as it would be by various phenomena and accidental circumstances.  The naturalist's work we should call true to nature.  The realist's work we should call false to nature." 

In his influential book, Naturalistic Photography, published in 1889, he proclaimed:

     "The rule in focussing, therefore, should be, focus for the principal objects in the picture, but all else must not be
sharp: and even the principal object must not be as perfectly sharp as the optical lens will make it."  

     Because of this Emerson was roundly attacked by his contemporaries for introducing "fuzziness" to photography. 
 He responded "...we have nothing whatever to do with any "fuzzy school."  Fuzziness, to us means destruction of structure."  
He goes on to qualify this by saying "We have, then nothing to do with "fuzziness," unless by the term is meant that broad
and ample generalization of detail, so necessary to artistic work."

These words, written more than a hundred years ago, embody the same searching spirit, the same willingness to cross
boundaries and subvert expectations, that distinguish Joy Episalla's work today.  She, like Emerson, is a disciplined rebel.

In a remarkable group of large floor pieces Episalla photographs the open maw of a variety of women's handbags. They are apparently empty and the darkness at the center of the image becomes a trompe l'oeil hole or fissure.  They become vaginas, and may initially seem debased by their position on the floor.  The fact that some of the handbags depicted are quite opulent, lined with silk or satin, may provoke tart associations.  But they also evoke Mother Earth and remind one of mythological passages to the underworld, such as those undertaken by Demeter or Orpheus.  Given Episalla's playfulness it's hard not to think of Alice and the rabbit hole as well, although the voice emanating from this hole sounds more like Grace Slick than Lewis Caroll. 

What is also striking about these pieces is that by displaying them on the floor Episalla is challenging the viewer to consider them as sculptures.  The dimensions of a piece relative to the dimensions of the room, and its position in the space, take on the same sort of formal value that one experiences in relation to a piece by, for example, Carl Andre.  Yet clearly there is a feminist and revisionist challenge being issued:  these formal values are now being assigned a gender.  And although a sense of vulnerable physicality is central to Episalla's work,
the work is not passive.  Handbag #2 has a rather sharp looking zipper which may leave the viewer feeling a bit like Carol contemplating one of those cracks. 

Joy Episalla: The Photograph Unbound

— Linda Nochlin, 1999

 ”Bareness and space (and spacing) are so difficult and seem to me of such greatness that  
I shall not even try to write seriously or fully of them. But a little..."
 —James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Curtains
Joy Episalla’s large-scale photographs move effortlessly between the sensuous immediacy of experience and the mysterious space of the dream. Blankets, (in a work of 1998-99), are piled up casually as though on a closet shelf: their colors are preternaturally rich, their textures wooly. They have that individual quality that human use bestows on the objects of our domestic life. And yet they are somehow more blankety than any blanket you have slept in: blankets at their most intense degree of specificity. Both curtain #14 and curtain #15 of the same year are to all intents and purposes abstract works, subtle patternings of colored stripes hovering on the surface of the paper. But when you look more closely, you see that these images, while certainly abstract in their appearance, are less so in their essence. Their stunning self-sufficiency derives, progressively dematerialized, from the blankets in the closet: #14 still retains a certain sense of bulge, of bulk, of irregular fold; #15 has reduced the traces of material origin to a kind of shimmering stain—yet still, the softness of their striping, their tenuous irregularity and gentle overlapping call to mind their humble beginnings on the closet shelf. In all of these works, the object, in all its surprising contingency, fills the frame.

Curtain #18 and curtain #19 reduce the field still further. Both seem to derive from a particularly moving and richly differentiated photograph of heaped pillows—used, worn, close-up, recording every stain and wrinkle, like the close-ups of the faces of tired old people. Curtain #13 and #16 are both more literally curtains—transparent veils hanging before a window—and more mysterious. The manipulation of light and shadow dematerialize their shape and suggest a space of fantasy beyond the window frame. The effect is quite different, however, in each case. #13 evokes an epiphany: I think of the ray of light piercing Mary’s glass pitcher in Grünewald’s Annunciation from the Isenheim Altar.
But in the photograph, it is more a contained double blaze of brightness. #16, on the contrary, depends more on shadow for its signification: that darkness children fear, lurking beyond the reassuring bounds of the known and the domestic. What is the status of the objects in these images? Ambiguous, they hover between extraordinary plenitude and non-existence; between the density of everyday material specificity and the evanescence of a cloud of translucent, pleated color floating before a frame of mute desire.

Bath (1996—ongoing)
Baths and the Bather seem like traditional enough themes. One thinks of Degas’ women awkwardly yet elegantly disembarking from tubs
or drying their backs, Cézanne’s massive females lolling on the banks of a river, or Bonnard’s wife dissolving in her coffin-tub. Joy Episalla’s vision of the bath owes little to the representational past (perhaps a scintilla of Frida Kahlo who did a self-in-bath subject). In a series of silver gelatin prints, the bath is constructed as a site of extreme subjectivity, of investigation of the mysterious territory of the self, viewed from the vantage point of the bather herself. In that series, the body is deployed as subject and object at once, an intimate but foreign country fading away in the distance, legs and pubis dissolved, like a disappearing archipelago, by mist and steam. What we think we know best (visually) is rendered strange. By self-photography the body becomes like a cloud, its essence a constant process of transformation, the temporal dimension of ever changing form.

3 Baths (installation 1998)
In 3 Baths, on the contrary, the position is one of stark objectivity. The three baths, unpeopled, are sited in a field; the view is a distant one,
the objects far from us. Clearly illuminated in space, they suggest perhaps gravestones—or cows: something that naturally belongs in a field. In a second photograph of the work, space is diminished and a certain Donald Judd persistence of simple form comes to the fore. A final close-up changes the viewpoint. Now we confront the interior of a single tub, in all its metallic, ordinary specificity: the soul of the tub, its tin heart. I think perhaps of Rachel Whiteread’s tubs—or rather where her tubs are not, the space of tublessness. Episalla, on the contrary, grants us the metal tub-in-itself, a richness of presence.

As was the case for James Agee, (and his co-conspirator in the making of that 1936 masterpiece Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the photographer Walker Evans) who sought the spiritual and material quidditas of the most banal object, a certain quality of light is absolutely necessary to Episalla’s achievement; that, and an equally meaningful shadow. Unlike the case for Evans in the ’30’s, however, the truthfulness of her whole project depends on the knowing and evocative manipulation of the photographic given, a reworking of the captured trace.

Her objects are, must be, ordinary, undistinguished, vulgar even. Her images never are: they are always distinguished by an uneasy and disturbing elegance. We see this vulgarity-elegance at its most invigorating in the photo of lampshades, twin icons of bad taste, redeemed
by verfremdichkeit. Although anthropomorphized, and feminine in their seductive shape, coyly corseted in pink, it is nevertheless clear
that these are or were somebody’s lampshades. Their clarity doesn’t make them any less mysterious: on the contrary.

The Transfiguration of the Commonplace

—Michael Cunningham, 1999 

Joy Episalla’s work achieves what Flannery O’Connor called “the transfiguration of the commonplace.” Although O’Connor’s life and
work could not be more different, at least on the surface, than Episalla’s, I find that I often think of O’Connor’s greatest fiction when I look at Episalla’s photographs. Like O’Connor, who was fearless enough to believe in sin and redemption, Episalla seems convinced that every being and object, no matter how outwardly humble, is infused with an essential mystery, the way any single strand of DNA contains the blueprint for the entire organism. Like O’Connor, Episalla sees the world with such stubborn subjectivity that the most ordinary things—a pile of pillows, a curtain—hint at depths so elusive and profound it is hard to give them a name. And like O’Connor, Episalla understands that if grace and transcendence do in any way figure in our lives they almost inevitably arrive with an intensity so blinding and terrible we may not survive, at least not in our corporeal form.

 Like the work of most artists I revere, Episalla’s photographs render me, at best, semi-articulate. Trying to talk about them resembles the difficulty I face, as a novelist, when I try to write about the world in which I live. Episalla’s art, like the world, is complete; it contains its own meaning. Like the world, Episalla’s work inspires in me a certain fear that I can add nothing to it; that in fact I will only reduce it by picking at a thread here and a thread there; by calling it this or calling it that.

 I’ll do the best I can to account for the particular depths of feeling Episalla’s work summons in me. First I have to praise its straightforward, unapologetic beauty. At this time in history, Episalla’s  devotion to beauty is just about as fearless as was O’Connor’s distinctly unfashionable belief in sin and redemption. While her work conjures in me the same slightly queasy sense of slumbering menace I derive from O’Connor it also possesses, in abundance, the generosity and melancholy kindness of Felix Gonzales-Torres. Like Gonzales-Torres, and unlike O’Connor, Episalla loves the surface of the world, its rampant thinginess. It would be one thing if Episalla were determined to reveal the beauty in the ostensibly unbeautiful—that’s a relatively common undertaking—but she’s after something more peculiar and dangerous than that. She probes for the dark, associative beauty in objects like bedding, drapery, clothing and accessories, all of which purport to be beautiful but in prosaic, obvious ways. She rescues these ordinary objects from their own modest ambitions, and reveals them in their truer strangeness.

 This revelation seems to work, in part, through Episalla’s linking of the objects not just to the people who have used them but to flesh itself. Two of three pillows are stained, drooled on or bled on; the third is immaculate. The interior of a handbag is almost shockingly organic and sexual. In this world-within-the-world, people’s most intimate appurtenances are not just marked by use but transformed by it; they are transubstantiated, like bread and wine. Although they remain pillows, handbags, draperies—the integrity of the object is always respected—they are also the ghosts of their users, and it doesn’t matter if those people are alive or dead. If the objects in a room know no difference between our temporary departures and our ultimate demise, this is a part of us that lives forever: this evidence of our eating, our sex, our sleep, our collective humanness, with the surface particulars scoured away. Dreams were dreamt on these pillows, troves of information carried in these handbags, but the specifics have vanished into a larger appreciation of our collective dreaming, our vast autobiography of keys, medicine, identification.

 I think of Episalla’s photographs as charting a line between the domestic and the profound. Their depths emerge as I look longer.
The pillows are mounted on panels that don’t quite match up; the curtains are treated simultaneously as recognizable curtains and as abstractions composed of color, texture, shadow. Stitches, spots, and stains often figure prominently, and they are always ravishing.
The joinings and the accidents are every bit as beautiful as the objects’ more legible attempts to be perfect versions of themselves.

 We live in bodies, we live in rooms, and we eventually leave them. Episalla’s work insists that the stuff of art resides as squarely in our ephemera as it does anywhere else, and that the various geographies of a curtain, a human form, a pillow, a gesture and a dream are at least as much alike as they are different.

 Here, then, are the body and its humors, memorialized. Here are the rips and tears, and the attempts at mending. Here is a curtain, beautiful, enigmatic, treated as the subject—never mind what might or might not lie behind it.

 Here is the rigor of O’Connor, the wrenching and unsentimental  sweetness of Gonzales-Torres, and here, of course, is something else entirely, something Episalla has invented. Here are a few insubstantial objects—just thread and air, some feathers, longer lived than the body but ultimately as perishable—exalted, seen in all their beauty and strangeness, adored.