Proof: Emily Ward Bivens at Tailgate Gallery
catalogue essay by Julie Wills

An ambivalent relationship between truth and reality lies at the heart of Emily Ward Bivens’ work. The spaces and characters she constructs and re-constructs retain enough plausibility and history to avoid being labelled ‘fictions.’ When interviewed, Bivens begins to talk almost immediately-- and with a slight air of moral defensiveness-- about the fine and perhaps unnecessary line between lying and storytelling. “A story or stretch of the truth isn’t necessarily false, even if it is not based in factual reality,” she says. Her created spaces-- walls, rooms, cabinets, environments-- embody this ethos; the spaces (and sometimes physical inhabitants) seem to be plucked from their natural surroundings and reassembled in the gallery context for our anthropological pleasure.

This is not to say, however, that the viewer has the upper hand when encountering these spaces. Quite to the contrary, it often feels as if the viewer is the one to have been removed from regular experience, and is left to sort through and try to make sense of the space’s historical logic. In this regard, Bivens’ works invoke a physical experience correspondent to a literary magic realism, and sometimes reminiscent of the richness found in Bivens’ New Orleans childhood as seen through the haze of memory.

Bivens’ spaces are densely layered, but subtle and evasive in offering investigatory clues. She is interested “in the most banal happenings and spaces of life, and the stories that come with them.” These stories are told piecemeal through the residual evidence of a space’s historical inhabitants-- stains, changes to the architecture, debris, and forgotten treasures all contribute to our understanding of the space’s history. The idea that a space has absorbed the emotion and experience of its inhabitants is centripetal to Bivens’ work.

When questioned about her working process, Bivens reveals that she envisions works formally before beginning, but must get into character before beginning construction and allowing the space to sediment or evolve. These are the characters who contribute their emotion to the space, and are essential to the magical plausibility of the work: Bivens layers drywall mud and wire mesh while wearing brown alligator pumps or dowdy loafers, pausing at regular intervals to sip tea from an ornate teacup. While occasionally Bivens hires characters to inhabit her works or videotapes actors in her spaces, all of the characters begin as an extension of Bivens’ own identity. The characters fill out her own personality and experience, she says, but this enables a sort of embodied detachment: Bivens can simultaneously be and observe these personae.

As an aid to understanding her objective, Bivens refers to Lyall Wilson’s The Nature of Things: The Secret Life of Inanimate Objects. She enthrallingly recounts collected family tales of, for instance, a lost and rediscovered wedding ring whose dates of disappearance and reappearance mimic precisely the thirty-year trajectory of its wearer’s marital bliss. “Interestingly enough, the ring no longer fits,” she ends perfunctorily. Bivens collects, categorizes, and recreates through her works the real and envisioned family history told through objects, structures, and spaces.