David Joseph’s photographs of his mother’s apartment, after her death, are quiet, raw and tender. A bed becomes a fenestral opening, a transitional object that lets Joseph commune with a mother whose corporeal form is gone, but whose influence can still be felt, in the mundane of a stripped bathrobe, a lopsided wardrobe, a coffee cup. Joseph’s works alone in the apartment, not forcing catharsis, but trying to make something out of both his loss and his love. These images, sanctify the everyday and hint at the incremental and deeply intimate textures of grief. Emerging from the black and white images, the watercolors of life in the Caribbean, where his father was from, are expansive and childlike. These paintings are not of the external world but come from the imagination, mountains above a modest house, Joseph’s aunt taking sheets off a line. All are green, like the plant, in one, that defies a cold silhouette of black skyscrapers. These works together, expand out from Harlem into the tropics and hint at the difficulty of the emigrant transition but also its beauty, and wonder; the heroic ability to hold two worlds at once. Grief fragments, these works attempt to bind, to acknowledge life’s impermanence as well as its continuous flow.

Written by Darcey Steinke