Joey Gonnella: Love Will Return in a Different Way

Tiny, graphite drawings on creamy paper, each the size of a playing card, line the walls at eye level. Shadowy yet meticulous and framed in alternating colors, they’re like a collection of little messages sent to remind you that things are worth searching for.

In one, two children sail off in a little boat, imagining themselves pirates. One reaches back to try and catch a star, a real, raw diamond. Of course, it will only get further away as they sail on.

Across from it, a sky scattered with stars, one of them another diamond. It’s Canis Major, Orion’s dog, home to Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, the one sailors steered home by for centuries

Further along, Salomon August Andrée, the Swedish explorer who tried to reach the North Pole by hot air balloon, examines his deflated balloon. Is he lost? Is rescue coming? He disappeared into the Arctic soon after. Decades later, his photographs would be discovered. The explorer never came home, but his story did.

Then True Love, in small capitals, sweet as a hand-stitched piece of embroidery, made to be exchanged in secret. Anyone can shout these words. Almost no one can whisper them and mean it. Love might be the most impossible expedition of all. But go there, we must.

Joey Gonnella (b. Boston, 1997) received his BFA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts in 2020. He lives and works in Brooklyn. He draws on a personal archive of found imagery, historical references, and fragments of visual culture, stringing them into new constellations where one image changes another's meaning.