JOY RAY + EMILY SILVER
Speak to Me
The Middle Room
Los Angeles, CA
September 12 - October 10, 2026
Speak To Me is an evocative, tactile exhibition that explores the intersection of words, fibers, and form, creating a complex, dialogue-driven pairing of two distinct multidisciplinary artists who use mixed soft sculptural media and language as subject matter. The text and textile works of Joy Ray and Emily Silver navigate the spaces between expression and material, abstraction and legibility, heartache and humor. Drawing from textile traditions while pushing into three-dimensional space, their works challenge the boundaries between text and image, asking viewers to encounter fragmented and reconfigured words not only as something to read, but as something to see and feel—where meaning hovers at the edge of recognition.
Within this shared conceptual framework, Ray and Silver move in strikingly different emotional and visual registers. Ray creates solemn, dense, monochromatic, contemplative works that reach toward what is remembered, inherited, and unknowable. Silver infuses her work with vibrant color, texture, and exuberant materiality, giving weight to sharp wit and tender vulnerability. The installation brings these distinct bodies of work into proximity, creating a dynamic exchange across the gallery space where intensity and levity, grief and resilience, the intellectual and the emotional exist in productive tension. The compelling physical surfaces carry complex narratives that extend beyond the literal meaning of words. Speak To Me considers what happens when language leaves the page and becomes physical—when words become both subject and visual elements, transformed into structure and surface while taking on functions and meanings beyond their literal definitions. The works invite close looking, revealing layers of meaning that emerge through the contrast between what can be understood and what can be felt, while leaving space for what remains unresolved.
—Shannon Rae Fincke, Curator
Two artists share parallel interests in textile assemblages that corporealize language and color into somatic objects insisting on taking up both space and time, juxtaposing diverse haptic methodologies in pursuit of an understanding beyond the dominion of image. Ray explores recovered historical fragments, rendering withheld passages of personal and civic lore through densely quilted, midnight-hued sculptural objects and force fields that look like recovered memories. Silver generates her intense coloristic bundles fusing stitched typography with exuberant profusions of yarn and scraps, balancing a sense of dangerous introspection with a visual code of buoyancy. At today’s talk, the artists engage in further dialog about their sources of inspiration, their material choices, and what it feels like to operate at the dissolute border of story and sensation.
—Shana Nys Dambrot, 13ThingsLA
VIDEO WORKS
Speak to Me includes the following video works by Joy Ray:
VOICE(S)
2025 (1:39)
VOICE(S) was created in conjunction with The New School Art Modality and originally screened at Hauser & Wirth (New York, New York). In this video, Joy Ray (with the help of an AI chorus), considers what it means to “find your voice.”
MAYBE MAYBE NOT
2021 (:10)
WE SEE YOU
2021 (:12)
HELP US
2021 (:10)