Artist Talk: Carol Emmons

 Carol Emmons describes art “as places to physically explore and in which to compose personal reveries. In this way, the works also engage art itself, conceiving art as experience rather than object, and positing it as an ongoing collaboration between artist and viewer”. 

This is a line from Carol Emmons’ artist statement. I will say at the beginning of the talk, seeing Emmons’ work on the screen, it took me a little to realize that her art installations are life-sized for a viewer to experience by immersing themself in the exhibition physically; at first I thought she built smaller-scale environments and installed them. I was a big fan of the Egg Universe - Orphic Egg piece, “Cosmogony 2.0”, and particularly “Mneme XXIX: Tourism”. I found it interesting that many of her works involved the notion of time and the formation of the world, such as “Cosmogony 2.2” (2016), where she portrays the universe as if it was spun from a grandmother’s handiwork. Another thing I liked was how she chooses such cool light to create an interesting ambience in the installation. My favorite lighting was the one shown in “Miasma” (2022); that final picture on her website is really moody and a little surreal feeling because of the deep brown/orange cast on the walls and from the candles. She describes in “Mneme I: Kenilworth, Milwaukee” (1984) that Mneme comes from the Greek term for “memory” and how she creates artwork based on past environments she has experienced and subsequently evokes artistically, such as that piece inspired by the coffee table at her parents’ first house. I found many of her works to be nostalgic. In the last page of “The Medium is the Massage” by Marshall McLuhan, he states that “the environment man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it” (82). One of the things Emmons spoke about was that research, site, and theme were most influential in facilitating strokes of artistic inspiration.  Particularly, since Emmons enters into a space and must decide how to transform that physical environment, the environment is both a medium for her to manipulate, and her artistic process is reciprocally influenced by that space.