“What if you saw photographs that were intertwined? How might the pictures change?
Rochelle Voyles’ solo exhibition entitled Unreliable Narrators, currently up at 81 Leonard Gallery in Tribeca, investigates this unique premise. Voyles, born in Toledo Ohio, brings a forceful work ethic to every question she explores. Acquaintances will know that she is an intimidatingly skilled craftsperson, her studio practice benefitting from a confidence earned through years of high-end production and fabrication work. In this expansive solo show, the viewer is met with Voyles’ fully formed and powerful thesis: that salvaged imagery can communicate extensively about the time in which it was made, and that this imagery can be recontextualized, by virtue of the collector and maker, into fresh investigations of socio-historical conventions and their pervasive consequences.”
Sherman, Kate, “A Show of Slithering Snapshots: Unreliable Narrators by Rochelle Voyles”, WhiteHot Magazine, March 31, 2026
“Rochelle Voyles does not make work that settles. In Unreliable Narrators, her solo exhibition on view through April 11th, shaped wood collages built from found paper ephemera become a way of thinking through gender, labor, history, and the instability of images themselves. The works are materially dense and visually active, but what gives them their edge is something quieter: a refusal to land. Voyles is not trying to deliver a clear message or resolve a tension. Instead, she lets fragments collide, then steps back just enough for the viewer to feel implicated in the act of making meaning.
“I’m attempting to describe a narrative,” she says. “But I recognize it’s unreliable.” That admission is not a limitation. It is the structure of the work.”
Everhart, Morgan, “Rochelle Voyles is Suspicious of Certainty”, ArtRabbit, March 24, 2026
“In Unreliable Narrators, Rochelle Voyles’s collages hold both a capacious nihilism and a hope to build stories from the void. From this fulcrum, I think of Joan Didion’s classic essay The White Album, and its opening truism: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Voyles’s compositions of found photographs extend to viewers, a branch, a bone, a tool in making sense of the randomness that seems to rule our lives. Cutouts layered into loops capture chaos, but the care in each cut, the curation, and the collision of hyperspecific images betray a belief in an idiosyncratic order. These works are at once figurative mazes of manifold meaning, and objects calculated to short-circuit our thinking and experience pure sensation.
“Flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning’ beyond their temporary arrangement.” That’s how Didion describes a mental break; it sounds eerily familiar to anyone who scrolls through social media. Voyles describes this dissonance, this dissociation with her dense mix of eclectic images. Yet color and composition cohere the components into an unruly whole.”
Kaplan, Will, “Unreliable Narrators: Rochelle Voyles”, Art Spiel, April 1st, 2026
“Rochelle Voyles’s Defense and Entrapment (2026) immediately signals an exhibition that refuses to play it safe. Drawing from her background in carpentry and a sustained interest in textiles, artist Rochelle Voyles’s solo exhibition Unreliable Narrators examines the friction within personal memory and collective history. Photographs are estranged from their original context; Voyles reclaims their stories through cutting, assembling, and reconfiguration. Archival images manipulated in this way circulate as deteriorating cultural tropes, revealing systems of oppression and the reconstructed stories left in their wake.”