A Show of Slithering Snapshots: Unreliable Narrators by Rochelle Voyles at 81 Leonard Gallery

 Building Vs. Erosion, collage, paper, and wood, 2026

By KATE SHERMAN March 31st, 2026

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.

  Install shot of Defense and Entrapment, collage, paper, and wood, 2026

Displayed in the gallery’s elegant outward-facing window, Defense and Entrapment is made, like most works in the show, out of collage, paper, and wood. This materials list sounds deceptively simple, but a close look at any of Voyles’ works demonstrates the complexity of her project. Take Defense and Entrapment – there are eight seemingly near-identical shapes installed with horizontal and vertical symmetry. All of Voyles’ larger works in Unreliable Narrators are shaped like threads in embroidery diagrams, but not all of these forms articulate the same meanings. In Defense and Entrapment, these shapes frame collaged photographs of military jets, black-and-white photographs of soldiers, and threatening angles of “defense” architecture. In other works, Voyles’ oversized thread substrates relate to organic movements of snakes, bugs, or the swirling insides of mammals. But Defense and Entrapment is neither organic nor biomorphic – it's as if the threads have been forced into military step, communicating mechanized obedience over the anarchy of organic anatomy and nature.

 Close-up shot of Neptune in Pisces, collage, paper, and wood, 2026

In sharp contrast to the distillation of militaristic aesthetics in Defense and Entrapment, Neptune in Pisces, a smaller work by the entrance of the gallery, evokes the carefree curliness of a hastily-scrawled bar tab signature. Neptune in Pisces is a great specimen to focus on in order to engross oneself in Voyles’ masterful collage logic. The sky blue behind a flock of flying birds is Exacto-bladed into the edge of a photo of deep water, while two rhyming but different crops of water with sunlight glinting on its gentle peaks are separated by some, but not all, of an unidentifiable piece of infrastructure– maybe a piece of a bridge, or an oil rig. A missile or rocket blasts off in one of the right-side loops, reminding us that manmade projectiles tear through the sensitive ecology of Earth, leaving devastation and chemtrails in their wake.

 Home, Eventually, collage, paper, wood, 2025

Like any thoughtful and experienced artisan, Voyles finds ways to utilize her off-cuts and scraps. Because she is an artist investing in exploring the image-form axis, even her recycled works are strange, structural, and deep in more ways than one. Home, Eventually, is an oddly serene assemblage in the hall of off-cuts to the right of the main showroom. A sun-bleached photograph of desert terrain is cleaved open in a central cut, clearly a negative space of some swirling positive space nearby. In these smaller, tighter compositions, as well as her flat, framed collages, Voyles’ reveals more context by employing larger parts of the photographs she collects. The effect is one of subtle but distinct proportions; while the colossal wooden threads in the front of the gallery seem to be writhing on the walls with the energy of a thousand sliced landscapes, the small works hang sturdily in place, inviting a more (but still not) conventional sense of pictorial space, consequently feeling more slow and narrative in nature.

 Close-up shot of Pincer Movement, collage, paper, and wood, 2026

It is while one is thinking about the origin of each of Voyles’ sourced photographs that the existential gravity of what she’s presented in Unreliable Narrators really shifts into gear. By opting to piece together the very faces of her works from the offerings of a photo collection curated by fate, Voyles channels the raw and unadulterated hum of mediated existence across every surface. Her medium is her own associative thought processes, which, consciously or not, greet the massive emotional weight of the world through photographic evidence of its famous beauty and infamous atrocities. 

Unreliable Narrators is up at 81 Leonard Gallery through Saturday, April 11th. All images courtesy of the gallery.