The title of this work, Grab, is more than appropriate. It reminds me of a carnival grab bag, with
throwaway items, ridiculous and cheesy. But Joel creates his own grab bag; I can smell
the sawdust, taste the funnel cakes, ride the Ferris wheel and see the whole drama
framed against the beauty of the All American night. Joel spells all of this with letter strips
and fragments, impossible to connect or disconnect. The colors bash into one another, sometimes
brightly shining, sometimes battling for supremacy, sometimes contrasting color
with black and white. The pieces are
language charms, word hexes, broken letter prophets. What’s beautiful here is that the music staves
organize the factors of the series, implying both a merry-go-round’s crazy
delight and the soaring soprano of some
Mozart opera.
I love these segments, I love how they intersect and create
maddening compositions, multiple angles and meanings sliced on a guillotine. Some of the pieces I really dig: “of darkness all”, “kingdom of am” (these two
lines create bookends, “all” implying universal sadness, “am” suggesting the
glow of higher consciousness for us all). Slips of paper reading “fa”, “LIB”, and
“ir gr” are open to interpretation, as are most pieces. You can mix and match fragments, single
words, and gorgeous glyphs brought together in
an unexpected random/ not random universe full to bursting, sprawling,
spreading out, making one giant uber-multi-referential epic.
A trip to the carnival is dizzying: cotton candy, house of mirrors,
tilt-a-whirl. For Joel, these things all
exist on those music staves. Reach into
his grab bag and you’ll pull out that perfect melody, those massed chords, the
words that won’t be words.
I love this stuff, and I love roller coasters.
Bill DiMichele
Grab
--Joel Chace
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