Emmi Whitehorse: Language Imagined
May 12 - July 29, 2006 @ BMoCA

Touch is all important to Emmi Whitehorse’s unique style. She uses her hands to smear, caress, and fine-tune the dry washes of her grounds. The actual drawing process is equally intuitive. Close-up intimacy paradoxically evokes the long vistas of the Navajo cultural and geographic journey across the unique landscape of the Dinétah, the homeland. Distance is concentrated by marks, forms, and scrawls suggesting the way sparse vegetation or moving wildlife calls attention to itself in vast spaces. Viewers can choose - as we adjust our eyesight our depth of field, to Whitehorse’s intricate ciphers - whether to read these signs of nature as either very near (“myopic",” she calls it) or very far away. Either way, the tangles of marks amount to a secret cache, a secret code.

In older works Whitehorse recalled specific plants, her father’s brands, and her grandmother’s weavings. Sharply drawn details within the landscapte around Kin’Nah’Zin’ (Standing Ruins), where she was raised, have since given way to vaguer marks and images that float to the surface of her work as though from deep under the water of consciousness; or, switching metaphors, they are vlown across the surface of the land until they come to rest on the fields of color she has prepared for them. these “puzzles” imply ambiguous meanings still drawn from very close observation of nature. “It feels like weird science, “ she says, “like working out mathematical equations… I have fun making it up.”

- Lucy R. Lippard