Janet Malcolm
Janet Malcolm: Collages
January 16 – February 21, 2025
Reception: Thursday, January 16th form 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Bookstein Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of collages by Janet Malcolm. Selected from three distinct series, this will be the first exhibition of Malcolm’s collages since her passing in 2021. This is the artist's sixth solo show with the gallery.
The first collection of collages, dubbed Free Associations, started in 2011 and began to form in the artist's mind when the papers of an émigré psychiatrist who practiced in New York in the late 1940's and 1950's—many of whose patients were themselves émigrés—came into her possession. The extracts from case studies appear in combination with fragments from early 20th century medical, surgical, astronomical and technological texts, as well as appropriations from contemporary art, giving these works a dream-like (and at times nightmarish) quality. The collages' source materials of yellowed handwritten and typewritten notes play the dual role of verbal signifier and visual element. The melancholy of once cutting-edge, now antiquated textbooks dovetails with that of the Freudian case studies—which, in Malcolm's words, summon "a period in psychiatry that is as remote from today's practice as the manual typewriter is from the Macintosh computer."
The second set of collages, known as the Emily Dickinson Series (executed in 2013) was inspired by the late writings of Emily Dickinson as found in Marta Wener’s Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing. The publication brings together forty of Dickinson’s late drafts, also known as the “Lord Letters,” and is presented with facsimiles of the original writing alongside the typed transcriptions. In Malcolm’s collages, she reappropriated this text, juxtaposing it against seemingly unrelated visual ephemera, such as highway mileage charts and antiquated photographs. Most predominately, however, Malcolm combined Dickinson’s writings with astronomical images.
The final series of collages, posthumously referred to as the Jesus Collages, began in 2015 and have never before been exhibited. Evident in all of the work is a series of stickers that Malcolm had produced based on a found image of Jesus Christ reproduced in earthen red tones. Although printed as stickers – close examination will reveal the circular die-cuts on the sheets – the artist chose to incorporate sheets of the stickers into her collages alongside reproductions of Muybridge photographs and pages from astronomical and celestial science catalogs.
In a brochure which accompanies Malcolm’s Free Associations exhibition at Lori Bookstein Fine Art in 2011, Hilton Als observed: "Malcolm’s desire to order the world is not so much the desire to re-create or control it as it’s an exploration of its various elements—those moments of being that are no more, and that were as true and fake as anything else.”
Janet Malcolm (b. 1934, Prague – d. 2021, New York) is the author of fourteen books and was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. In addition to her extensive practice of collage making, Malcolm has produced a series of photographs of Burdock leaves. A book of these prints, entitled Burdock, is available from Yale University Press.
Janet Malcolm: Collages will be on view from January 16 – February 21, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, January 16th from 6:00 – 8:00 PM. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11:00 am to 6:00 pm. For additional information and/or visual materials, please contact the gallery at (212) 750-0949 or by email at info@booksteinprojects.com.