Pamela Joseph has been working with the iea since its inception. Her 2001 wall installation, The Hundred Headless Women, consisting of wood-burned kitchen cutting boards and ironing boards was originally created for The Torture Museum, which was part of Pamela Joseph’s traveling interactive exhibition The Sideshow of the Absurd. Over the years Joseph has continued to develop additional pieces for The Sideshow of the Absurd. The title, The Hundred Headless Women, pays homage to Max Ernst’s brilliant 1929 book of collages and engravings. Joseph’s images come from a wide variety of sources which the artist has been collecting for decades. The images show a heroine who is always smiling despite the perilous and dangerous situation, and she always survives. In 2008 Pam worked with the iea to produce an artist book of this series by scanning the cutting boards using extended focus technology.
Pamela Joseph is a multi-media artist who lives and works in Aspen, Colorado. Her paintings and sculptures address ideas of feminist critique and socio-political issues. Her work was described as “well-executed, powerful and edgy” by the Colorado Council on the Arts, who awarded her a Visual Arts Fellowship in 2001. She was subsequently selected as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2003 and 2004. Francis M. Naumann Fine Arts in New York City represented Joseph from 2007 until the gallery’s closing in 2019. In the fall of 2021 she exhibited bas-relief sculptures of mask/headdresses called Radical Beauty at the Michael Warren Contemporary in Denver. Joseph recently completed a three-year master program at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, CO., with instructors Holly Hughes and Shahzia Sikander.
Pussy Strikes Back!, 2015
Woodblock, Sheet Size: 30 x 22.5 inches
Pussy Attacks!, 2015
Woodblock, Sheet Size: 26 x 30 inches
Pamela Joseph produced these woodcut prints from her Censored series. By using a laser-engraver to cut the boards, she was able to achieve astonishing results which are more like washes found in lithographs than what one would expect in woodcut printing.
The Hundred Headless Women, 2008
This artist book, handmade in China, is a compilation of images on wood burned kitchen cutting boards of women in perilous situations.
Pamela Joseph’s artist book, The Hundred Headless Women, is in codex format with three volumes encased in either a roll top wooden box or a linen fold-over enclosure. The teak box version is laser engraved, while the linen box is metal foil stamped with Joseph’s signature drawing of the hundred headless women magic trick. The outside covers of the three volumes are a vibrant Chinese red, and embossed with the ink drawing studies that were used to make the cutting boards. The books have traditional butterfly fold with Chinese string bindings. Volume I is text and Volumes II and III consist of horizontal and vertical images respectively. Each book is signed and numbered by the artist.
RESOURCES:
pamelajoseph.com