Stellar Scape

June 4 – August 9, 2015
Gallery 4

Featuring Emily Fleisher

Artist Statement:

“My work has always been predominantly about physical space and the ideas of home intermingled with the landscape. I play with the boundaries between interiors and exteriors in my immediate surroundings.

A few years ago I moved to the suburbs – a subdivision from the ‘80s in San Antonio. We’re surrounded by strip malls, fast food restaurants, and big box retailers. My homeowner association approves the house colors so the mostly brick and stone houses are accented in a mix of light tan, a slightly darker shade of tan, and brown. When we bought our house, the previous owners put a fresh coat of light tan paint on every wall and put down new light brown carpeting. Lawns are green, but we and some others refuse to water so it reverts to brown dirt during the Texas summers. It probably seems as if I don’t like my neighborhood, but I actually do. It’s just an odd way of existing compared to my previous more urban environments.

It took me (quite) a while to settle in here and as I did, I became hypersensitive to the things that are atypical in the rather bleak suburban landscape. These interruptions break my expectations of my environment and feel like mini moments of revelation. One day as I left for work, I turned the corner of my street and came face-to-face with my neighbor’s burst water main. A giant fountain of water was gushing about eight feet up into the air nearly perfectly aligned with the center of the house. It was like Niagara Falls meets the posh, glittery fountains in the gardens of Versailles. The past five years have been full of similar spontaneous events, where the monotonous suburbs feel like they’ve been withholding these moments of insight into the monumental.”

More at emilyfleisher.net