BRYAN NORTHUP

EMERGE
9 - 11.2021

Co-located at
Gallery Pink, 149 Harrison Street, Oak Park
6750 Wilcox, Forest Park

If fortunate, we’ve been forced to face our half-faced fellow humans for what seems all of our recent memory.
Masked against a virus, against smiles, against recognition.  
Are we alien to one another?
Afraid of catching a “worst case” from a fellow pedestrian we have been driven underground.  
And yet, we’re emerging,
willfully forgetting for a moment, shrinking back at the thought of variants a minute later.

Still we are pushing through the ongoing unknowing, though silently screaming or singing or simply agog.
When will we recognize ourselves again?
 

This work is a collaboration with artist/curator Gina Lee Robbins who encouraged me to manifest this idea which originally was a spontaneous Instagram post. Gina shared materials and a vision/direction for rolled plastic slices to come alive and emerge from the ground in multiple locations, mimicking Edvard Munch's Scream or agape alien faces.
For me ‘Emerge’ has become a gestural metaphor for living through the pandemic. A boiled down collective expression of how we are feeling and coping with the aftermath of the last four years of politics, our planet in crisis and finding our way in a freshly disturbed landscape.

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There are two groups placed in two locations, at Gallery Pink  and at Gina Lee Robbins home in Forest Park, tying the two together and echoing the theme of Keep In Touch.

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I work with collected single use plastic, rolling and slicing it into dimensional marks for making wall reliefs or sculpture.

for this installation I am attaching the single large slices to black drainage pipe and repeating the forms at varying heights in groupings of 8-12.
At Gallery Pink, they will be clustered to the entrance column, facing different directions at various heights, encountering passersby.
 

At the residential location they are emerging from the ground and vegetation in a concentrated area.