Emilia White: Maternal Interior Exhibition Opening

Work by Stamps Lecturer Emilia White is featured in Maternal Interior, a new exhibition opening at the Ann Arbor Art Center with a reception on Friday, May 5, 2023 from 5 – 8 pm.

This exhibition aims to broadly capture questions of the relationship between the inner and the surrounding through the lens of the maternal figure. This space, the maternal interior, is an inner sphere that carries a palpable weight. Not only is Interior Space a thematic pillar in art history, but it also contains an intricately personal wrestle. We sometimes resist its connotations and closed doors while simultaneously craving its privacy and a space’s innate commitment to our nondisclosure agreements. (I mean, if only our walls could talk, right?) Does the exhibition explore what the expansion of one’s maternal body does to the expansion of our space and, therefore, the expansion of our art? As patterns, color, and light subtly shift along a wall, the perspective seemingly revealing that of the onlooker and that of the artist – or as an object is layered and stacked, becoming both a weighted burden and a lifted trophy – how can that spatial relationship speak to the brevity of human life and our need to make sense of home as mothers?

Within this interior sphere and this exhibition, we see ideas of memory, loss, loneliness, pattern, the table as a concept, and much more weaving themselves as strong threads into each piece. This exhibition builds a collective display of many layers of maternity. Not one piece says it all, and not one piece is supposed to.

Maternal Interior
May 5 — June 25, 2023
Ann Arbor Art Center, 117 W. Liberty St., Ann Arbor, MI