Danny Báez’s REGULAR•NORMAL Presents Née by Melissa Joseph

April 2, 2021 (New York, New York): Melissa Joseph presents her first solo show in New York with REGULAR•NORMAL.

Née is Melissa Joseph’s first solo show in New York, consisting of 32 pieces that will run through May 2 of this year. The name Née (French, literally ‘born’, feminine past participle of naître) nods to birth, rebirth, origins, labels, women, legacy, creation and the past. It leaves open many questions about where the artist is from. Joseph uses intuition as a guide in her work and when it comes to titles for her exhibitions. She writes: “Names connect us to a past that we don’t know but we carry anyway. I feel like a messenger. And I am not the first artist to feel like this, but I get messages, and I make work to communicate and recontextualize them for anyone who wants to look. There is so much intuition and emotion in everything I do.”  Joseph's unusual upbringing is reflected in her work. She grew up as a mixed-raced child in rural Pennsylvania surrounded by natural materials such as wood, stone and wool that inspire her work to this day. Her father came to the US from India in the 1970s where he met and married Joseph's mother who was born to second-generation Irish immigrants in Pittsburgh.

An important element of the show is the color turmeric. The entire show is deeply personal and invites people to have a glimpse into moments of Joseph’s life that were meaningful either because they were special or because they were ordinary. Turmeric would stain all the dishes and utensils at her house. Although she uses a lot of neutral colors in her work this is a color that she always comes back to and the turmeric-colored fibers you’ll find throughout Née are all derived from recycled sari silk. Joseph has been working with images from her family archive since her dad’s passing in 2015. Every time she recreates his image, it brings him back-just for a second. Joseph: “I am still trying to understand where I came from. Most people are, but I have had some big paradigm shifts and reframes in the last 5-10 years, so looking back is never neutral. It’s not nostalgia, it’s really a way of “re-seeing” or trying to see things I might have missed more clearly.”

In her practice Joseph uses natural materials, mostly wool felt and textile with textiles being her native language. Speaking of her own work she highlights that she’s an object maker first, image-maker second. Felt fuses the image and the object into one rather than a substrate and a medium. The paintbrush is great but it also creates a barrier between her and the paper/fabric/object.  The softness and distortion of the mediums she uses also lend themselves really well to the content of memory and slippage that happens when we access them.

About the artist: Melissa Joseph is interested in connecting people through collective memory and shared experiences. Her work addresses themes of diaspora, family histories, and the politics of how we occupy spaces. Her work has been shown at the Delaware Contemporary, Woodmere Art Museum, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Rider University, Collar Works, and featured in New American Paintings, ArtMaze, and Maake Magazine. She participated in residencies at the Center // Substructured Loss (Berlin), the Growlery (SF) Chautauqua Visual Arts (NY) the Textile Arts Center (NY) BRIC (NY), and, currently, the DieuDonne Workspace Residency (NY). She is represented by the RegularNormal Gallery in New York.

For all inquiries, please email danny@regularnormal.org     @regularnormalnyc

REGULAR• NORMAL

HOURS

Wed / Thurs : 1-7pm

Fri / Sat : 1-8pm

Sun : 1-6pm

41 Elizabeth St.

7th Floor

New York, NY