Emily Leach presents Reminder (On the Cultivation of Decay) August 1 - August 29, 2020. Visitors are invited to view the works at night through the windows of ALL's new Livingston building, with the best viewing time after sunset and ending at midnight.
“One never knows ... whether it will be the soloist, the conductor or the entire personnel of the orchestra that will be unable to appear. The only sure thing is that someone will be ill.” Musical America, 1919
“We are afraid to get sick, because if someone in the family gets sick, you know, they say that with one being infected, they can quarantine everybody … If that were to happen, what are we going to do? Who’s going to go out to work?” Bertha Morales, Democracy Now, 2020 (translated from Spanish)
The glass photographic slides in this show were collected on eBay in March and April of 2020. These slides have been decommissioned from various cultural and educational institutions. They are artifacts of an outmoded projection system, mass-produced and consequently not especially valuable.
All of these images were taken during the period of the so-called Spanish flu, between 1918 and the early 1920s. This collection was borne out of an interest in representations of landscapes during pandemics. Who is cultivating, maintaining and subject to the land? How can absences and ellipses become impulses?
The title of the show, Reminder, is taken from the push notifications for watched items on eBay. Unlike memorials, which are often ossified and sanctified, reminders are an insistent prompt.
Emily Leach created this body of work as part of her participation in Bridge Work: Madison, a year-long program geared towards mentoring emerging artists in Dane County.
Interview
Window View: Emily Leach's 'Reminder' Contronts Current Climate
This exhibition is supported in part by a grant from Dane Arts, with additional funds from the Endres Manufacturing Company Foundation, the Evjue Foundation, Inc., charitable arm of The Capital Times, the W. Jerome Frautschi Foundation, and the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation. The artist also thanks Ken Flanagan for collaboration on the design and fabrication of the magic lantern projectors.
