The Light Gallery: Review of Up From Here Opening

Up From Here, the current exhibition on display at The Light Gallery, opened Friday January 21^st, as a collection of works by the artist Emily Hines, a recent MICA graduate. The show contains her large most recent drawings and collages on fabric as well as her installations of small pieces and writings. The title Up From Here and the artwork presented “emerges from an ongoing spiritual dialogue rooted in a series of personal losses…they ratify…the validity of a person’s spiritual and emotional experience”(Hines). The subtexts in the title are that both act of the creation of the artwork and the act of the viewer interacting with the artwork at the show are ways of moving up from a personally low place. Each piece has its own variation on the subtexts, but all pieces both large and small are communicated in with the subtlety of a limited pallet of pigments, graphite, and small pieces of textiles attached with sewing pins.

The opening reception drew a very large crowd that comfortably congregated in the bright high ceilinged front room where Hines larger works were installed. Those periodically fleeing the great crowd were drawn in the lowly lit back half of the gallery where they were given the time, space, and quiet to investigate Hines’ smaller more intimate works.

One piece in particular If Your Presence Does Not Go With Us drew a tentative gathering of viewers who one by one moved close enough to the work to smell the cotton fibers. If Your Presence contains 28 small portrait drawings, negative test strips, old Polaroid’s of family members, photo transfers on delicate fabric, and pages torn from torn from old books. The pieces were arranged in an organic fashion on the wall hung to creating flowing spaces in-between the works filled with handwritten text from William Faulkner and Roald Dahl on the wall. It is both in this piece and in the larger piece In the Sleep that the use of pins reveals the complexity of the stories being presented. Though both If Your Presence, and In the Sleep contain details and lines committed to with great care and respect, textiles that make up some of the hues inside the portraits and cradling the heads of the figures, are attached to the surface using small discrete metal pins. These pins pierce the flesh tones of the portraits, emphasizing both the delicacy of the materials being used and the delicacy of the emotions that went into the cultivation of these images.

The time spent with these works is much akin to spending time with a person. The works slowly reveal intimate details of a broader narrative of personal loss. But it is the sharing of these slowly released, intimate details to the viewer that brings about the exchange between the viewer and the artwork and a greater empathy for the stories and the people involved in their creation.

Up From Here gives viewers a space to contemplate and empathize with the emotions not easily shared through conversation and other social encounters. My own viewing experience allowed me to meditate both on the emotions and the skillful execution of Emily Hines’ work. The show will stay up through the 15^th of February and viewing is by appointment.

-by Kathleen Durkin