Née 

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 one 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 second-generation Irish from 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.