FUTILITY INDEX | EMILY PROMISE ALLISON
17 SEPTEMBER 2022 - 19 NOVEMBER 2022
The Futility Index photo series depicts the limitations and possibilities of physical balance. Utilizing an array of household, industrial, constructed, and natural materials, Emily Promise Allison intricately balanced and photographed hanging assemblages. The details of each assemblage were considered with an utmost regard for authenticity meaning that nothing in the composition was altered in post-production. The resulting artwork is a collaboration between the artist and natural forces, as gravity demands the size, weight, and position of the item to be added next.
Futility Index bears a resemblance to another photographic series, Equilibres (1984-86) by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Fischli and Weiss similarly balanced household objects in unexpected and precarious compositions but while Equilibres used items like bottles, tape rolls, and chairs, composed of items in the studio or the workshop, Emily’s series differentiates itself in both its seamless presentation and inclusion of natural materials, deliberating on an inability to reach permanent balance.
Emily’s use of a tomatillo, a branch, or a rose suggests that each balancing sculpture is temporary. As time passes and the leaves whither and vegetables rot, the natural exchange of matter and forces will eventually topple each sculpture. Although the works depict intricate balance, they draw from Emily’s appreciation for the tense, unstable, and absurd forces within each of us. If each photograph is really a sign of futility, the quest to strike a permanent and stable balance in our psyche, emotions, or lives is really the futile act.
Emily Promise Allison is a conceptual artist who uses photography and performance to create images that embrace surreal, metaphysical, and dreamlike qualities. The purpose of her work is to activate curiosity, stimulate a sense of wonder, and enable a collapse of status and expectation concerning theoretical knowledge versus lived experience. Emily regards the imagination as a fundamental sense that allows us to find or create magic within systems regulated by logic; celebrating the surreal nature of existence and the absurdity of life.
SAAG Art Library Project: In 2020, the SAAG began presenting exhibitions as in-situ interventions within our Art Library.
The Art Library Project features a diverse selection of artworks and mediums from regional contemporary artists. Artists are invited to think of the library as a unique exhibition context by investigating the SAAG’s programming around readership, publications, and its place within Lethbridge’s historic Carnegie library which opened in 1922. Artists are encouraged to consider the physical architecture of the library and its material holdings, responding to a broader and generative idea of what a library might be, as they change and adapt to new forms of knowledge production.
Curated by Adam Whitford, Interim Curator, Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin.
This exhibition was made possible with funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the City of Lethbridge.