Jeffrey Joyal

David Lewis is pleased to present Jeffrey Joyal: Finalists, a solo exhibition at their Tribeca Gallery, featuring woodcuts and a silverpoint drawing on deadstock offset lithograph posters and a new sculpture titled, Therapy (2023). This is Joyal's third exhibition with the gallery.

"I started collecting these deadstock posters before I knew if I had any use for them in my art practice. I ordered most of them online from three vintage poster dealers, all based in the Berkeley area. They came in all slightly different dimensions, and printed on different cardstocks. Sometimes they would credit the photographer, and other times they would simply say “Printed In Usa.” One of them has a hand-drawn smiley face in one corner. They were mostly sent to me rolled in tubes, except one that was folded up and sent in an envelope. What has always interested me about counter-culture ephemera like these is the temerity it takes to produce it. Whether the people who made them did it out of serious belief, or out of self-interest, is almost always an open question.

When I started thinking about printing over these posters, it was easy to imagine people interpreting it as some kind of negation of their image. But overprinting these posters is not a violent act, or an X-ing out. I think of it more like tapping into a shared American history and leaving a new layer. An image with spatial depth (barn doors) has been flattened by the technique (woodcut printmaking), and printed on top of antiwar agitprop (two kids holding hands; a gun holster filled with flowers; the plea “No War Toys”). These images and phrases were meant to be powerful, even transformative, but they, like the barn doors, have been flattened. The feeling of flattened possibility, that “there is no alternative”, goes hand in hand with a cynicism readily available to us. I’m interested in busting out.

Every practice develops within and as part of a life, and ways of making can correlate to ways of living. Making a drawing, carving a woodcut, pulling a print – these are all solitary activities that can teach an artist about how to live with themselves. Plans change. You make certain rules about how you want to make a piece, and then you inevitably bend them to address some other set of concerns that matter to you, and this may or may not concern the viewer. You make a problem that only you can solve, because you made the rules in the first place. To the extent that these procedures can bounce back onto your life in general, process can become a revolutionary act, in a very different way than content. Everything is connected, but not necessarily the way we say it is."

—Jeffrey Joyal

Jeffrey Joyal (b. 1988, Boston, MA) lives and works in New York, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include Box Set, Gaylord Apartments, Los Angeles, CA in 2023 and Deepfake, David Lewis, New York, NY in 2019. Joyal’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.