Shoeings — Emily Mueller

*Homage*, 12x12”, Handmade tempera paint on panel, 2022

A group exhibition featuring work from Erin Tyler (Springfield, MO), Emily Mueller (St. Louis, MO), and Kelsey Hamilton Davis (currently: Skælskør, Denmark)

Organized by Monaco member, artist, and curator Kalaija Mallery

The definition of practice is an intentional return to something. Encapsulation, reconciliation. A hazelnut. A rock.

The three artists exhibited in Shœings present process-based practices as an intuitive, intrinsic way of making, perhaps working in contradiction to the more logical contemporary receptions of art that privilege qualitative research, objective fact, a more masculine tradition of knowledge-creation. Such stunning corporeal deviation is rooted in antithetical chaos and devotion. It is not to be tamed, it cannot be taught.

In practice, these three contemporaries join what Mallery understands to be a movement of New Transcendentalists: artists who create to connect to something higher than material – the ineffable. The resulting works may simply become artifacts of such processes and perhaps are imbued with the trace of this energy, or may become rendered entirely inanimate. The process of creation in and of itself echoes and demonstrates that of sound waves, of seances, of rare moments of unitive consciousness, where we may have fleeting moments of recognition of the Great Design, and see that “it is good.”

“Then he showed me a small thing, the size of a hazelnut, nestled in the palm of my hand. It was round as a ball. I looked at it with the eyes of my understanding and thought What can this be? And the answer came to me: It is all that is created. I was amazed that it could continue to exist. It seemed to me to be so little that it was on the verge of dissolving into nothingness.”

Julian of Norwich, 14th cent. The Showings