« Lately, I’ve been thinking about places in transition, about these moments when the familiar begins to feel unfamiliar, when nothing has quite changed, and yet something already feels different.
I started writing these few words in August, just after my last studio visit with Emily Spooner. When I arrived at her building on Durocher, I took the elevator to the fourth floor, just as I had the last time. I found myself floating in this liminal space where, behind the many doors lining in the hallway, there was sometimes emptiness. I couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was, but the space seemed caught between being inhabited and being left behind.
Half of her stuff was still there, while the other half had already been packed into boxes. Emily was soon moving to Sackville, New Brunswick, and she told me I was the last person she would receive in the studio. We spoke about the growing scarcity of affordable studio spaces in Montreal, and how these places form part of a larger artistic ecosystem, sustaining the relationships, exchanges, and conditions that allow artists to work.
The Durocher studios, where Emily made these paintings, are soon to be demolished to be replaced by condos. She had told me that the building was falling apart, but even in that state, it was still well-loved. During the final months before its closure, she continued painting, alone, as the artists around her were gradually departing from their studios.
And yet, the works that were conceived for Somewhere are still full of life. Their vibrant colours suggest a shift in season, holding both vitality and a sense of fading. There is a sense of restlessness in the movements and the richly textured surfaces carry a particular kind of energy, one I imagine was shaped, at least in part, by the atmosphere of the studio.
For this first presentation at the gallery, depictions of abandoned amusement parks and carnival structures once built for pleasure and collective experience are now slowly being absorbed into the landscape. Details of carousel horses and arcade booths retain traces of the excitement they were designed to produce. I find there is something uncanny about these objects, which seem to exist somewhere between the mechanical and the animate, as though memories of their former life still linger.
Perhaps nostalgia begins in this space. Between what is still here and what is already slipping away. Emily's paintings inhabit this threshold, this somewhere between energy and decay, presence and absence. »
-Mathilde Bertrand Pilon
