Mosaics and Tangles

Rochester Museum of Fine Art’s Carnegie Gallery • Rochester, NH • rochestermfa.org/carnegie.html • January 4–March 28, 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mosaics and Tangles: Clarity and Confusion at the Rochester Museum of Fine Art’s Carnegie Gallery showcases the masterful illustrations of Dublin, Ireland based artist Chloe Feldman Emison. The exhibition merges two bodies of work: Mosaics and Tangles, as well as the resulting offspring of the union: an amalgamation of mosaic tangles, or tangled mosaics, whichever way you choose to interpret them. Between 15 and 20 pen, ink and watercolor drawings are on view: as intricately detailed as honeycombs; as eyecatching as tubs of rainbow sprinkles.

Given the level of manual labor involved, it comes as no surprise that Emison, a New Hampshire native and a graduate of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University in the UK, takes months to complete a single mosaic: “My hand starts to hurt pretty quickly. I take a lot of breaks.” Her process is organic, starting from one corner and working outward. Though she has an idea of the color palette in mind, there is no blueprint, no set design. Rather, she says, her work grows naturally. During her many breaks, she turns to other creative projects, including a collaboration with Chicago-based Elements Contemporary Ballet. Emison is illustrating a libretto, Atlantis, for the company, from which it will construct a full-length original ballet.

Bodies in motion also inform the series Tangles, whose androgynous, leotard-clad figures float midair like a troupe of trapeze artists. Imagine Henri Matisse’s painting Dance mated with illustrator Quentin Blake’s bald Witches from Roald Dahl’s classic, and you start to get the idea. The tessellation of Emison’s conjoined performers in their harlequin uniforms speaks to the Mosaics; the coupling of the two series, Mosaics and Tangles, produces a third, dizzyingly clever form of visual acrobatics: a balancing act of color, shape and anatomy.

Make sure to appreciate the manual labor involved here, but save yourself from going cross-eyed by stepping far back from the wall, until background and foreground harmoniously merge. And keep a look out for Emison’s forthcoming body of work: a study of martyred saints. One can only imagine.