Melissa Joseph’s Artpace exhibition, A wide action is not a width, is a love letter to San Antonio, and a meditation on the selective permeability of our interfaces with others and the environment. The title comes from Gertrude Stein’s linguistic experiment, Tender Buttons, in which she repurposes words and shifts our perspectives toward them, which is how Joseph uses found objects and archival imagery. This installation honors her family and the city of San Antonio, where the river is a central vein that both divides the city and flows beneath its foundation. Through found objects and felt paintings, Joseph highlights untold stories and their forgotten relics.
As visitors step into the space, they find themselves between embedded clay pipes. These pipes were used widely throughout San Antonio, but their porous nature has rendered them obsolete. They are now vestiges of the past, replaced with materials like PVC and other plastics. Melissa reclaims these old clay relics as frames for small felt paintings. The images are moments captured from Joseph’s time in San Antonio, where she has spent two months as an Artpace resident.
The centerpiece of this installation is Texas Jali, a truck bed from a local scrap yard with a custom-made headache rack recalling the Indian ornamental screens that filter heat and light. The surface of the truck has a blue-green patina that could be viewed as a painting itself, with a small rectangular space cut out by the previous owner. Although it is a mass-produced, manufactured object, Joseph is drawn to the personalization and care of its original handler. Embedded in the center is a small felt painting depicting a set of fingers wearing a golden ring with a pink stone; her brother’s hand wearing the ring their late father once loved. Like an altarpiece, Joseph transforms the object, celebrating it and the memories it possesses.
On the south wall is a large felt painting, Indian Dirty Dancing, from an archival image portraying her parents dancing in someone’s backyard. It presents many unanswered questions surrounding the circumstances of the event for both the artist and the viewer. Joseph repurposes the fragmented moment, leaning on the viewer’s imagination to create the rest of the story. A wide action is not a width exists on a continuum with Joseph’s previous work, which also deals with familial archives, although this scale is a new direction for her.
Melissa’s process is intuitive, working with materials she connects with, which may have been significant to others like her in the past. She listens and responds to objects that she feels drawn to. This is a superpower of discovery, a thread to be welcomed, pulled, and reworked by new hands. Through world-building, Melissa Joseph taps into the essence of objects as much as she does of the people who wielded them.
–Ada Smith Genitempo, Residencies and Exhibitions Manager
