April 17 - May 22, 2020
Reception: Friday, April 17, 5-7 PM
For her most recent body of work, Susan Emmerson’s imagery is that of creating and destroying; of depicting the horrible violence that natural storms, worsened by human mistakes, can do to our structural environment and to our fellow humans. Her wall sculptures depict disheveled, broken surfaces where Tyvek painfully peels away like paint or skin, exposing a raw inner core. Everyday objects become precious; she uses their bits and pieces as signifiers of the lost reassurance of a safe and intact home. Her work exists in the space between image and object; between the picture and the palpable. The drawings she makes are meditative renderings of the ridiculous and horrifying scope of the violent destruction of our now insecure world. They serve to present a different aspect of the question of what a home is and what happens to our human spirit when the physical safety of home is destroyed.
Specifically feeble and precisely precarious, Lisa Walcott’s work translates elements of daily life. Moods, guilt, sensations, monotony, accumulation and change are given bodies in objects and movement. Spaces of the mind are realized in physical form and daydreams animated. Up close and in combination they begin to represent the fluidity and contradictions of the everyday. The task of locating and giving form to shapeless sensations like presence, agitation or what it feels like to be full after eating will eventually fail because these feelings can never quite be manifested. However, there is often something more desirable in the always-absent compared to the attainable. The attempt to find shape and materiality for these abstract ideas involves collecting, combining, squinting, and meandering forward. The works are as energetic as they are visual—agitation buzzes overhead as a housefly and presence unexpectedly gurgles from an unknown space. In many cases, the objects feel essential, like they couldn’t be anything besides what they are—their physicality is vital for them hold their position and their essence is what the work is about. There is a sense of balance that is on the verge of being lost as joints are precarious and elements within the pieces are codependent—everything has a place for now.
