Review by Saskia Ozols Eubanks, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Tulane University for SECAC.

Lin Emery: Conversation. Polished Aluminum, 6 3/4 x 19 1/2 (orbit) inches, 10 3/4 inches (base). Photo courtesy Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans, LA.

We get, then, these three things: one that in nature, we would say God produces; one which the carpenter has made, and one made by the painter…Consider then, this very point. To which is painting directed, to the imitation of reality as it is or of appearance as it appears. Is it an imitation of a phantasm or of the truth? (Plato, The Republic, Book X)

A walk past the sculpture of Lin Emery brings to mind the light of spring and invites reflection on our relationship with the larger world we occupy. Her kinetic sculpture exists in tree and leaf-inspired forms that create environments alive with movement, gentle wind, and the quiet dialogue of witness. The viewer contributes significantly to questions concerning relationships between the real, the truth, our perception, and nature.

As we navigate a labyrinth of interstitial space created by highly polished, moving, and mirror-like leaf forms, we participate in a certain choreography. The dance reflects light and sky and even one’s own searching glances. In works such as Conversation, this relationship blossoms as five polished aluminum leaves rotate in response to a distant vibration of artificial wind. The fans themselves inspire a glance upward that may not otherwise occur. This act of being in nature, a skyward gaze searching for sound brings a flicker of reality as our own movement responds to what the natural world normally provides within the artifice of pristine gallery walls.

This exhibition allows the potential for meditation on macrocosm and microcosm through the visual poetry of form and our response to it. We search for our place in the larger environment, our own relationship with nature, and the many spaces we occupy in-between.

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Saskia Ozols Eubanks is a painter with a 20-year exhibition record in numerous cities, including New Orleans, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and St. Petersburg, Russia. Her research and teaching focus is realism, perception and gender. She currently teaches at The New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts and Tulane University.