Gleaning the Spirit
Ewing Gallery of Art + Architecture
2023
Photos by kelsie conley
Exhibition Statement:
Gleaning the Spirit is born from a deep dedication to sustainability and belief, where ideas and spirits intertwine with materials. Emily Rice uses a variety of materials, including plastics, textiles, wax, wood, cement, soil, ceramic, plaster, iron, and found objects, to establish an intimate and essential relationship. Rice's studio-based work extends to urban and rural interventions, seeking collaboration with the landscape and its elements through sculptural drawing. The repetitive act of making is a transcendent experience that enables communication with spirits and entities beyond their consciousness, reinforcing their beliefs and understanding of the world beyond the physical realm.
Rice engages viewers by weaving personal and collective storytelling and belief systems. Through generative fictions, they explore the transmutation and transcendence of materials and the entities that witness them. Rice is fascinated by the relationship between place and space and how animistic qualities can be observed and applied to sculptural drawings, linking different time planes and functioning as portals to pass through.
The exhibition follows a two-room floor plan that offers a physical story on transition and transformation–from the forest to the clearing. It reveals post-apocalyptic fragmentation and sustainable resurrection through their queer futuristic lens, where materials such as plastic, textiles, plants, wax, wood, cement, soil, ceramic, plaster, iron, and found objects remain in such a world. Investigating and reshaping torn, broken, and dead materials is their alchemical method for transfiguration and a way to gather time together, examining the fascia between relationships and time. Gleaning the Spirit provides a discourse on landscape, myth, and historic folklore, connecting spirit realms above and below.