By CAROLYN BROWN
Staff Writer
A colorful exhibition of surrealist artworks layered with personal and cultural symbolism, “How to Bear the Unbearable Body: The Artwork of Emily Orling,” is up at the A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton through Saturday, Nov. 1.
Emily Orling in her studio in Belchertown. Her show, “How to Bear The Unbearable Body” is at the A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton through Nov. 1. Staff Photo/Carol Lollis
Though the exhibition will also feature some sculptures and assemblages, much of it will be a collection of artist Emily Orling’s large-scale oil paintings about motherhood, which are “layered, sanded, gouged, and repainted, revealing ghosts of earlier images beneath the surface,” according to a press release. “Figures emerge from decades of mark-making as sacred and grotesque, intimate and archetypal, depicting babies, mothers, children, and elders in moments of care, agony, and resilience.”
“My initial idea was, I just wanted to be a stay-at-home mom,” Orling said. “I just wanted to keep things simple and have some babies and make everything nice, and I very quickly realized that I was intellectually and creatively unsatisfied, and I needed more. I needed something more complex and deep to latch on to, and motherhood is a lot of drudgery and repetitive labor, and it was hard to only do that.”
Many of Orling’s works also feature a notable amount of empty space. In one painting, a child stands alone, wearing a red monster costume and an ambiguous, uncomfortable expression as they look at the viewer. In another, a child sits on a wooden chair in the corner of a canvas, nearly blending into the background, which is the same color as their all-white outfit. In another, a naked male figure falls through a white void, surrounded by a sparse collection of red flowers.
Orling said her interest in using emptiness is because she wants to remove “everything that might locate the paintings in this moment of time – or, really, in any place,” because to do otherwise would take away from the meaning of and focus on a figure itself.
Emily Orling and César Alvarez at their home in Belchertown. The painting behind them, called “Mary,” inspired the musical written by Alvarez called “Painting Mary,” which will be performed Oct. 17 as part of “How to Bear the Unbearable Body” at A.P.E. Gallery. Staff Photo/Carol Lollis
“I don’t want to call up any contemporary or specific objects that would position [a figure] in any part of time or space.” she said. “It’s just that this is the gesture of the body in that moment, and I want it to be working the way a hieroglyph would work, like a fundamental symbol that is explaining a feeling.”
Orling’s career has also taken her into the performing arts world: her work has been seen at venues like Lincoln Center, Soho Rep, Ars Nova, and Jacob’s Pillow, among others. She’s also earned Lortel and Drama Desk nominations for her work on the Off-Broadway show “Futurity,” written by her longtime partner and collaborator, César Alvarez, who she lives with in Belchertown.
As part of “How to Bear the Unbearable Body,” Alvarez and Orling will also host a number of performances at A.P.E. (“If you come to all the performances, you’re gonna win a fifth free performance. We’re gonna punch your card,” Alvarez joked.) Additional performances will include collaborations with Katrina Goldsaito and Fletcher Boote.
One of Alvarez and Orling’s performances is a public reading of a new musical, “Painting Mary,” on Friday, Oct. 17, at 7 p.m. The show is about Orling’s long process of creating a painting of the Virgin Mary, which will be on display during the show.
“Hacking a path through mental illness, artistic meltdown, and motherhood, the play turns into a musical turns into an opera turns into a piece of performance art,” the show’s event description said. “Mary arrives eventually. And the spirits talks [sic] to the plumber.”
That performance will also be a collaboration with the audience, in an unusual way: the last scene of that show is the opening night of the art exhibition itself.
“Coming to the opening is getting to be part of the event that is going to be inscribed in this play,” Alvarez said. “If you come to the performance, you’re really going to get to be part of the story of the work.”
César Alvarez and Emily Orling in Orling’s studio in their home in Belchertown. Staff Photo/Carol Lollis
Orling says that her artmaking, which has long been “a healing practice,” has also become, over time, “a spiritual practice.” Though she doesn’t practice a specific religious tradition and didn’t grow up in a religious household, she views her work as “spiritually charged” and her process as “a devotional act of recovery and intuitive making”: “Everything I make feels sort of channeled, but also it feels like it often demands to be painted,” she said.
One example: her painting “Earth School,” which shows three babies asleep on a decaying white background. It sat in Orling’s studio for months, untouched, even as an idea struck: “Every time I looked at it, I saw that I needed to paint these big, bubble green letters that said ‘Earth School’ at the bottom of the painting, and every time I looked at it, I was like, ‘God, that is crazy idea. I can’t do that. That looks weird. Why would I do that?’
“But I understood, after many months, that that was a message, that that was guidance, and I needed to listen,” she said.
Since then, Orling has learned “how to listen quicker and quicker to these intuitive hits that are calling forth the art that I need to make,” she said, “and when I do it, it’s very cathartic and it propels me forward.”
“The hope of the work is that the more mothers that can figure out how to share their voice,” Alvarez said, “the more we listen to mothers – and that goes all the way to Mother Earth – the more we listen to the consciousness of care … the more empathetic and caring and taken care of we are all going to be.”
Emily Orling in her studio in Belchertown. Staff Photo/Carol Lollis
“That’s really at the base of Emily’s work – what does it feel like to actually listen to a mother? Not a mother who’s performing being okay, but a mother who’s really trying to share what it’s like.”
“The work is difficult and dense and dissonant and scary and vulnerable,” he added. “And that’s what it’s like. And that’s real.”
The gallery is open 12 to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, 12 to 8 p.m. Fridays, and closed Mondays and Tuesdays. For more information about Emily Orling and César Alvarez, visit emilyorling.com and cesaralvarez.net. For more information about the show and upcoming performances, visit apearts.org.
Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.
