Unreliable Narrators - 81 Leonard Gallery Tribeca, NY - March 2026
In Unreliable Narrators, Rochelle Voyles explores the cyclical nature of humanity’s patterns and the underlying impulses that drive behavior. Mining historical textile diagrams and vintage magazines, Voyles arranges fragments of different moments and settings, people, objects, and places meticulously in collage on-wood cut sculpture. Layering and abstracting time, the work reveals and challenges the social narratives embedded in found images, exposing how history and collective memory are constructed and repeated.
The images Voyles uses find her, whether passed down through family, gathered from travels abroad, or discovered in vintage stores and flea markets. She is drawn to the idea of preservation, to the moments people felt compelled to capture and memorialize, but with an understanding that photographs inevitably fail at objectivity. There is no singular way to convey a happening, and media will always reflect the perspective of its narrator. Voyles acknowledges this instability: “In searching for these answers I have found the narrators to be unreliable. A found image comes to me biased in how it was taken and why. My decision to collect and add it into one larger story inevitably reveals my own bias. This work is made through searching for answers with the realization that ultimately there may be none to be found.”
Voyles’ largest works take the forms of knot and embroidery diagrams, as well as knitting patterns. While referencing these utilitarian structures, their functions are obscured as their shapes mutate into glyphs resembling language, ultimately becoming a plane on which to interpret the story of the collage. The feeling that the artist intuits from the shapes initiates a searching process through the collected photographs.
Working as equal parts anthropologist and detective, she composes an argument about humanity from this leftover evidence. Piecing together disparate histories, a critique of power structures and social norms emerges, ultimately hinting at the crumbling of all that was once novel. Her titles serve as the most direct entry point into the stories these collages divulge.
The smaller sculptures and 2D collages are made from remnants; pieces cut away while in the process of building larger works. With fewer layers and no prescriptive structure, these smaller works are indirect propositions. They hint at what is cut out, left unsaid, or forgotten in our quest to innovate.
Altogether, the works in Unreliable Narrators reflect on how humans attempt to make meaning from a history often shaped by patterns of chaos, violence, and oppression. Through re-contextualizing images, Voyles introduces her own perspective, becoming an unreliable narrator herself.
Installation view images courtesy Elliott Desai. Individual artwork documentation by KC Crow Maddux.