FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Emily Blair Quinn

In Pleasant Company

Opening Reception: Saturday, June 28, 5-7pm

Exhibition: June 28 - August 3, 2025

MARQUEE PROJECTS is thrilled to announce In Pleasant Company, our third solo exhibition of multimedia artist Emily Blair Quinn. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, June 28 from 5-7pm.

The Madonna, the Maiden, and the Mystic are symbolic expressions of feminine energy culturally constructed over time by religion, mythology, historical narrative, folklore, art, and psychology. Quinn’s two- and three-dimensional work references and undercuts this recurrent typification as a way to more fully explore complex realities of the female experience.

Quinn casts resin sculptures from vintage porcelain figurines of women, androgynous figures, and children from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, a period in European and American culture which greatly informs contemporary Western biases, tropes, and attitudes regarding women. Then, under the bright intensity of colored light, she stages and photographs the resin pieces and the original figurines in tableaus that suggest confrontations, encounters, and other unsettling exchanges. These photographs become the basis for her paintings, yielding a body of work comprising the resin casts, the photographs, and the paintings.

Some of the pieces show a kind of double portraiture, with additional figurines inserted into the wet resin casts. The resulting translucent sculptures host opaque originals within their bodies, metaphorical composites which can be interpreted as mother and child, the “true self" or "child self," parasitism, spiritual possession, or other complicated psychologies. And the varying levels of expression and presence in these kitsch, painted faces create a wide range of appearance regarding cognizance and action: the figures on display in these narratives inhabit an uncanny valley between conscious agency and inanimate objectification.