In Foyer-LA’s current project, Blood Makes the Grass Grow, Emily Janowick examines how frameworks- both seen and unseen- guide us through our daily lives. Her installations provide alternative access to familiar architectural environments; encouraging curiosity and exploration. Janowick says, “I draw on my experiences as a queer, chronically ill, lower-middle class mother. My body oscillates between a celebrated and unacceptable societal status.” She uses this slippage as fuel to explore the fragility of experience and to suggest that ungroundedness can allow for lightness and change.
Working in conversation with a series of preceding architectural interventions from spring 2022, Janowick fills the space with bleacher-like stairs that lead to nowhere. Challenging social norms, the artist proposes: “How exactly does one fit in here?” Yet the stairs form a “stoop” for the viewer as well – to climb up, hang out, rest. At the top of the form a surprise awaits: sprouting Morning Glory vines- an invasive plant in her home garden- represents real time and change to the sculptural form.
During the last 40 nights that her eldest daughter, Shiloh, slept at home before departing for college, Janowick recorded the vines of bottle gourds and cucumbers growing. The time lapse video, exhibited in the cave-like niche under the stairs, transforms these tendrils into alien creatures, swaying and stretching as they search for new attachments in the darkness. Janowick reflects, “As the vines slowly grow, they wave and dance in tandem, at once mournful and hopeful, a perfect projection of my own grief and growth in this time. Plant parenthood has been a major part of our lives.” For this piece, Shiloh wrote a musical score for each 30-second video. These wordless songs, sung by Emily and Shiloh create a cooperative melody. Emily describes these collaborations as a form of relational aesthetics: “The family is the project.” Through this weaving of the personal and public, she explores how differences can be interrupted by commonality. A zine which accompanies the exhibition contemplates endings: “Everything has two endings–a horse, a piece of string, a phone call” she cites from Jane Hirschfield, as well as a childhood, a vine, a song.
I too am facing the horizon of a child departing from home. Emily’s project has stirred up in me the complexity of this situation; a separation both melancholic and filled with potential. It is a loss; a gift, a transformative moment. I find myself thinking about how movement and indetermination belong together, both necessary to understand either.
