Elysa Voshell, installation details from Carrion:
A Cartography of Roadkill (2006)
Philadelphia Introductions:
Elysa Voshell
by
Andrea Kirsh
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Philadelphia Introductions:
by
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February 28, 2007 Books are read with the hands as well as the eyes and are inherently mutable. Elysa Voshell is drawn to this multi-dimensionality of bookmaking; she creates sensuous objects to be held and touched as well as read, and sculptural works which record their unfolding and expanded forms. Books also allow Voshell to combine her early interest in literature with visual art, which she came to through photography. With her book works Voshell has pushed the boundaries of the book from ephemera to sculptural installations. One if by Land (2004) began as an edition of eleven offset postcards with text on the reverse. Both text and images documented a trip through Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean where Voshell explored how people behave in public space, with a particular interest in what she described as “liminal spaces,” the spaces between destinations. The images were lush, color photographs of fragments of scenes and the rather poetic texts recounted vignettes of the journey. The postcards interested Voshell because they were accessible to an audience that could never afford hand-made books. They also made sense for a piece based on travel. For exhibition in a London gallery the postcards became part of an installation; they were suspended in vertical stacks, on strings from the ceiling. Hung sequentially they became a deconstructed book which viewers could walk around. Behind the cards, which alternated from images to texts as they spun slowly with the movement of air, she projected a slide sequence of eighty further images from the same trip. The screen was positioned in the gallery window so that the images were also visible to passing cars from the street. She was working with the varied possibilities of storytelling as well as the multiple and possibly fragmentary way in which the work would be viewed: as a single postcard from the series, sent through the mail; as the sculptural arrangement of small images in front of the changing sequence of larger ones; or possibly only a window-sized image or two, glimpsed by an unsuspecting motorist. Voshell has always been interested in taking books beyond the sequence of bound, double-page spreads. In addition to the postcards she has experimented with other forms, such as foldouts and unbound pages. When she does use a conventional binding, she exploits the form. She has also engaged in a series of collaborative projects where the dialogue between word and image in the illustrated book reflects an actual dialogue between collaborators. In some cases she has illustrated another’s text; in others she designed and created a book from someone else’s images. With Strange Encounters
(2005) Voshell solicited stories from friends, then illustrated them with
Polaroid transfers on transparent paper. The pages with images are grouped
and folded into each other, creating interactions as they overlap through
the transparent paper. The text pages, printed via letterpress, are accompanied
by line drawings; most of these are figures placed so that half of each
one disappears into the gutter between the pages. Those gutters, which
are the bane of designers and of readers who care about imagery become,
instead, apertures through which figures can pass. The recto and verso
of the pages metaphorize into spaces. Voshell plays with the narrative
nature of the book as well as our expectation that each turn of the page
holds something new. Voshell’s interest in maps and their metaphorical implications continues in the colorfully-named Carrion; A Cartography of Roadkill (2006), an installation which has assumed various forms but always includes a group of pendant, sculptural forms, multiple prints on the walls and a partially-opened accordion-fold book displayed on a shelf or pedestal. The work began with a group of three-dimensional globular forms created from cast, hand-made paper and stitched with dyed bookbinding thread. The stitched seams have the quality of fresh but crudely-done surgical scars; the resemblance to wounds is reinforced by their color, which resembles dried blood. Alternately, they might be body parts, the dead animals of the work’s title (although I suspect the title is rather more playful than literal). The forms are irregular and of variable size from approximately 6"-12", and hang from fine threads. So far there are seventy of them, but Voshell is making more for future exhibitions of the work. The series of screen-prints are in the format of a book’s double-page spread, printed in brown ink on hand-made Nepali paper. Their imagery is derived both from satellite maps of Philadelphia (taken from Google) and from microscopic imagery of human tissue; these have remarkably interchangeable forms. In some versions of the piece Voshell includes pages from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities which she has over-printed. We want to touch and we daren’t; the work both appeals to and frustrates our desire to read. Beyond the formal seductiveness of shapes and patterns and the sensuous appeal of papers, printing and stitching, Carrion: A Cartography of Roadkill is a meditation on the parallels between the microscopic and telescopic, between flesh and earth, between the order of our systems of knowledge and the unruly forces of nature which they describe. Calvino’s Invisible Cities is based on the fiction of Marco Polo’s stories told to a house-bound Kublai Kahn. It celebrates both Marco’s imagination and the multifariousness of his home-town of Venice, which underlies all his tales. Carrion suggests that flesh and earth are equally manifold. Back to InLiquid's Commentary section index © 2007 Andrea Kirsh and InLiquid.com; image copyright © Elysa Voshell |