Parent Company is pleased to announce Wet Blanket, an exhibition by Emily Janowick, made with the assistance of James Chrzan and Sam Cockrell. In Wet Blanket, Janowick explores communality and connection as it pertains to grief, healing, love, and care. The installation consists of two toppled obelisks crossing one another, forming an X. X is a very apt symbol. X marks the spot in a treasure map. X, like a scar. X as in stitches across a broken landscape. X: a crossing, a meeting, an intersection. One enters the space and is immediately confronted with the scale of these two structures, which fully occupy the room.

Inside the tip of each sculpture is a transducer that transforms the plywood into rudimentary speakers, which relay vibrations throughout the gallery. The transducers each play a recording, one made by Janowick and the other by her close friend James Chrzan. The sounds were captured at ten feet of elevation and recorded concurrently while Chrzan was in Malibu, CA, and Janowick was 2,641 miles away in Kure Beach, NC.

As is typical in the artist’s sculptural installations, Janowick’s obelisks create both physical and sonic choreographies. The experience of the work changes based on position. Walking through the space will lead to variant, isolated experiences, mimicking the conditions of living in a siloed media landscape. It also reminds us that all experiences are shared, yet singular. We may have a communal purpose, intent, inclinations, or even lives. Still, our perspectives remain, despite it all, uniquely attached to our complex being, an alloy of singularly combined exposures, tastes, and views.

Very few contexts will give someone as powerfully humbling a sense of scale as the ocean will. Listening to the rhythmic sound of waves crashing on a shore can bring solace, healing, and perspective. The soothing certitude of an everlasting occurrence is anchoring.

In contrast to the ocean, obelisks are man-made monuments, erected structures celebrating victory and conquest. Refusing Western society’s principles and evolution as a positive model, Janowick presents this symbol of hegemony as inherently flawed and failing. This is the third in a series where Janowick has used the obelisk as form. Past iterations allowed literal insight into the shape, whereas the obelisks in Wet Blanket are closed.

This exhibition opens just following an election and closes right after an inauguration. The work marks a distinctive spot, asking us to sit with and consider the founding mythologies and iconography of our nation while pushing our awareness toward the actual, physical land we inhabit. In the hollow bodies of a national symbol, we might hear something more profound and beautiful that will outlast us all.

-Anne-Laure Lemaitre