The Sun Hovers Horribly at Low Angles Like a Slow Plane was crafted through my embodied
experience of the stagnancy of winter, poisoned by a dream about eating vile street snow. A need for deep blue began to glow inside of me, like a need for nutrients, replacing the usual need for the presence of red.

The Sun Hovers is a space with two entrances, one grand and quiet, the other up a staircase.
The paper, though anchored, billows with the displaced air of the walker. Entrance lions sit on the curtain rail, shoulder to shoulder, acephalous, denying the concept of an entrance. Tall rectangles echo through the space, but in a quietness. The essence of deep blue reverberates.

The installation on the stage, an unconventional annex to our MFA gallery, presented many
extant features to engage with or remove. Elemental objects, such as the 800 lb. spot lit stone resting on a neatly folded wool sweater, both counter and supplement the religiosity of space. The interventions rely on the stage’s form and significance, but quiet it, enclosing it with anchored paper and obscuring the modularity of the curtains which could open to an audience. Standing like model ship’s sails, the paper creates a room/stage. When you step into a channel built into a closet area in the back of the stage, the entrance in the paper wall is offset slightly. Vertical tension, clustered objects, large scale drawing and sparse lighting compel the viewer through the space.

It has been an exercise of training the horse, training myself on a visual goal. The aims to
amplify and modify the space include built structure and cast objects, which have a greater time signature than the drawing process and the intuitively responding and arranging to a space. This is a development from prior, shorter term projects that relied more heavily on gesture and response, though those elements remain present in this work.

Removing all but one curtain, leaving the curtain rails, removing the colored glass stage light
covers, removing some hooks, leaving others, sanding off some of the imperfections of the floor, leaving others, vacuuming, oiling and re-oiling the floor, dusting the curtain rails and painting the walls and vents was the first phase. Familiarizing myself with every feature of the space and attending to them all was essential to an intentional outcome. The effort was to make the space more body-friendly. The stage is a place for dance and movement, more so when maintained. The effect of this work is evident both in visual outcomes (clean, selected elements remaining) and in the trace of my activities of care. As experiential work, it will appear marginally empty to an impatient viewer; the trace of the labor of wall building and plaster work recedes visually, and it has to, or every building would be a visual cacophony.*

The trace of care on the other hand pools in the space, removing the architectural austerity
and sparseness from its native association as exclusive, cold. The warm tones of the wood floor reflect onto the cool, clean deep blues. Crisp white walls are punctuated and echoed in the white of the plaster lions. Blue appears three times, blue saturates the work.

The Sun Hovers is saturated with all of my behind-the-scenes attempts to interact with the
origins of the color blue, to concoct the antidote to the un-rotting snow. Bucked by the literal, I had to allow these attempts to make blue with milk paint or with indigo fall away. All the process work would coagulate and refuse to emulsify, it was too loaded to integrate with the space as color alone. A blue section of wall surrounding the plaster disc, a small blue enamel pot and some blue blossoms remain, cards from my blue deck, working toward balance in the composition and the matrix of winter.

Now spring’s tempestuous ascents and plummeting produce and harrow new leaves while last year’s persist in a pierced mat, run through with the spires of bulbs. Across the street from here, I tore away flat leaves to let up a phalanx of Siberian Squill. They greened from yellow overnight, blossomed the following morning. Blue end.

*For a carpenter, every building is.

//AFTERWORD

In a few places hung and once on the floor in a pile of shaving lay goat bits. They are replicas of a 1,000 year old bit melted out of the ice in current day Norway in an ice patch that was a trade route. The ice is melting due to climate change. Wooden bits such as this are still used in goat and sheep herding today as a tool to prevent a kid or lamb from nursing to short cut the reproductive cycle and to divert the milk to the shepherds. A string is tied around the notches on either end of the stylus and tied around the goat’s head and ears, seating the bit in the goat’s jaw behind the teeth. This allows the goat to chew and swallow, but not to latch and obtain milk.
In the retraction of the abundance of nutrients,
the tide goes out to expose:
.
Bare bay bed.
Spitting clams
the good stuff exposed for a time. Muck, slime, soft bodied beings with little crunchy bands like fingernails
across their backs.

Compare: snow plain to ebb tide

still water, ignorant of the level plane of meltwater
ignorant of rot, ignorant of bury
ignorant of scalloping, ascended in spines
more like piles of vertebrae
Minneapolis is a catacombs and the bodies of our refuse soaks into the snow and the snow contains the
putrid essence around us
plowed into mounds (replacing mounds, indigenous)
a catacombs with no echo
our wailing just sucked up into the high sky
the enclosure of a ceiling so different.
The smooth disc, busted out of the palazzo,
little birds flitting through the layer of mist.

Emmy Smith’s Website: www.emmyesmith.com

Instagram: @chevypetting