Metaphors and Interpretations

Artist Pamela Joseph has long been interested in collapsing seemingly unrelated concepts through an array of sometimes-antithetical aesthetic sensibilities. The results are discrete bodies of work that are unexpectedly coherent considering the thematic and stylistic multiplicity that informs and underlies them. The most recent of these efforts is entitled Radical Beauty and is comprised of a series of bas-reliefs that occupy the intersections of painting, printmaking and sculpture. This conflation of media perfectly reflects Joseph's longtime view of the sprawling nature of her art-making practice as well as mirroring the varied narrative and visual references she employs.

As is the case with most accomplished artists, Joseph first began exploring her creative interests early in life, spending many hours drawing in New Haven's Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. She subsequently studied simultaneously at both Simmons College and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, earning a Bachelor's degree granted jointly by both institutions. Then, after taking classes at the Art Students League of New York, she returned to New England to follow graduate courses at Boston University.

In 1990 she relocated to Aspen, having fallen in love with the charming town through her frequent ski trips there over the previous years. After settling in, she developed a profound connection to the world-renowned Anderson Ranch Arts Center in the nearby town of Snowmass Village. Over the decades Joseph worked together with a roster of famous contemporary artists that were likewise attracted to the center, forming lifelong relationships with many of them. Communing with these fellow artists allowed Joseph to not only refine her techniques, but to encounter their disparate philosophies. These experiences provided her with an array of novel insights that were manifested in her completed pieces evolving into her own distinctive visual language.

Doubtless the most significant bond that Joseph made at Anderson Ranch was the one she forged with artist Robert Brinker who ultimately became her life partner. The relationship between the two goes beyond the personal and extends into their corresponding art careers. Though the interconnections between their respective oeuvres are extremely subtle and therefore somewhat hard to see, they nonetheless, clearly exist. (To showcase the similarities and the differences of their points of view, the couple created a series of collaborations in 2019 called Hybrids.) This harmonic unity is particularly well seen in their shared use of fractured collage-like imagery, a standard feature of Brinker's compositions, and which Joseph also periodically employs to create hers, as she does with the pieces in the Radical Beauty group.

The individual works in Joseph's Radical Beauty are idiosyncratic formally and in terms of their specific content, with each having its own character, referent and composition. Yet there are many unifying characteristics that link them all together resulting in a singular rationale. This begins with the conceptual foundation of the series, the idea that every one of the pieces in the group is mean to be a facial covering. This is neatly laid out in Radical Beauty's subtitle—Masks, Veils & Headgear. Each bas-relief is anchored by a pair of eyes, some of which are rendered realistically, while others are abstracted or even simply referred to by mere suggestion. Joseph has tapped into a panoply of inspirational sources in developing the underlying stylistic and pictorial references used for the pieces in Radical Beauty. She cites such starting points as including the makeup used by drag queens, the masks of Africa tribes, Mayan headdresses, and the garish accoutrements of Mardi Gras and the Venetian Carnevale.

This isn't the first time that Joseph has looked to celebratory or ritualized events as fonts for her creations as best exemplified by her national traveling exhibit., The Sideshow of the Absurd. in that case, the circus or carnival is the base on which she builds a body of work that includes interactive installations comprised of found-object assemblages and ersatz posters in the form of paintings in order to ape the atmosphere of the sideshow. Though the elements of The Sideshow of the Absurd ate quite different in appearance and intent from those in the Radical Beauty group, the two bodies of work do share an obvious stylistic kinship. There are the toned-up colors Joseph prefers, and her expansive ideas about presentation and the nature of art objects, eschewing the idea of the straight-forward arrangement of forms. In The Sideshow of the Absurd, the aim was to convey an all-encompassing environment while the Radical Beauty works are more contained as individual pieces. Joseph does however violate the expected rectilinearity of wall-hung works in Radical Beauty pieces, replacing it with active edges that follow the margins of the pictorial elements.

The separate works that make up Radical Beauty are each meant to represent a single woman with Joseph choosing icons of women's history to signify a variety of social, political and intellectual pursuits. To use Radical Beauty as a showcase for honoring famous women is no surprise with Joseph having been concerned with Feminist art and ideas for many years. This makes the assemblages serve as portraits of sorts, but in a clever twist on that tradition, Joseph has disguised the women's features, obscuring her subject's faces in order to represent them. She does this by constructing imagery meant to conjure up those that she is depicting.

All of the wall-sculptures include illustrations of specific flowers serving as predominate positions in their compositions, and so as to stress their importance to the works, Joseph uses their Latin names as their titles. These flowers symbolize for Joseph the precise attributes of the selected woman such as the balancing scale indicating Ruth Bader Ginsburg's role as a jurist (in "Asteraceae") or the roses signifying Michelle Obama's former role as First Lady (in "Rosacea"). Additional imagery is also used, some of which takes on a poetic quality, like the bursting bombs of fireworks for Tammy Duckworth (in "Iris Germanica") with others being more pointed in their direct relationship to the subject, for example, the star map and space ship celebrating Sally Ride (in "Hibiscus Rosa-Sinensis"). Among other notables she includes in her personal firmament are Malala Yousafzai (in "Prunus Cerasus"), Nancy Pelosi (in "Doritaenopsis"). and Greta Thunberg (in "Linnaea Borealis").

Approaching the project with the awareness of all the many things she wanted to concurrently convey—including shrouding the portraits of women whose identities are revealed by certain images, in particular those of flowers—Joseph turned to digital programs. She begins by working out the general shapes she plans to engage for the compositions, and the selected imagery she intends to apply to the shapes, which she will consequently assemble on the monitor. These digital drawings become her preparatory studies which are translated into maquettes in the form of miniature versions of the yet-to-be created finished pieces. During this stage Joseph adjusts and tweaks the compositions, sometimes moving elements from their original intended placement, and at other times adding new parts, or subtracting elements entirely, using her instinctive sense for composition as the guide for her spontaneous if intentional decisions.

To make the full-scale pieces, fanciful shapes are cut from sheets of transparent plexiglass, both clear and colored, which are sometimes layered together to achieve just the right shade. The contours of these shapes follow predetermined outlines dictated by the intended painted or transferred passages. These transfers are often based on Joseph's own drawings. As she had done with the maquettes, Joseph continues to refine the pieces until she is satisfied with the results. The appropriate painting and transferring are carried out on the specified individual parts which are then collaged together so that they overlap each other in places. The stacking and arranging of the cut and ornamented panels lend a three-dimensionality to the finished sculptures that is difficult to capture in photographs, as is the differentiation between the lively surfaces of the painted parts and those covered in glitter, in contrast to the smoothness of the panels done with digital transfers of her drawings and other imagery.

The Radical Beauty series was launched by Jospeh in the waning months of 2019, with some pieces dating to that time, though most were completed during the lost pandemic year of 2020, when COVID-19 shut down the entire world. The final works in the set were done this year, in 2021. These facts are more than simply a chronological accounting of the making of the series given that among the chief precautions recommended against the transmission of the virus, which is still of concern, is the use of face masks. This is relevant since, as noted previously, a key component of the Radical Beauty sculptures is the reference to face masks. This association of masks with the pandemic altered our collective view of them, in that they were formerly seen as a means of disguise, or of identity transformation, which are the ideas that Joseph had been chiefly drawing-on to create the series. This change in the social nature of masks might have caused a problem for the underpinnings of the Radical Beauty suite, but Joseph saw it instead as an advantage in that it intensified her primary messaging, adding the protection from disease to the other more familiar evocations of mask-wearing.

In explicating the Radical Beauty series, it becomes readily apparent that Pamela Joseph has taken a more-is-more approach to technique, style, form, narrative and inspiration, crowding each piece with an incredible amount of visual information. Even more astounding in light of this, is that there's an undeniable harmony among them that draws all these elements together into a singular cohesive statement.

Michael Paglia
Denver, 2021