My multidisciplinary practice combines sculpture, photography and painting to explore the relationship between memory, domesticity, and the evocative power of objects.
5-50 Gallery presents Insight, a solo exhibition by Emily Blair Quinn. The exhibition comprises large-scale paintings on canvas, resin sculptures, a dollhouse installation and photographic prints. Quinn’s multidisciplinary practice examines how identity can take shape through a process of reflection and recursion.
Central to Quinn’s work are found porcelain figurines of women from the turn of the twentieth century. She arranges these objects in theatrically lit scenes inside dollhouses, at times transforming them through paint, wax, or resin before photographing them. These photographs become the basis for her paintings, yielding a body of work comprising resin casts, photographs, and paintings. To create her sculptures, she places the figurine inside a resin mold, producing translucent shells that encase opaque originals. These ‘dolls’ are performative objects which reproduce the historical conditions of objectification. Long associated with the concept of the uncanny, dolls occupy a space of near-human resemblance while remaining conspicuously devoid of consciousness. Their lifelike appearance, emotional stasis, and suspended animation generate a disquieting tension between subject and object, animate and inanimate.
Dolls and figurines have long been objects to look at, but Quinn shifts this dynamic by creating a closed loop of looking between the object and its observer. Her work brings the interior psychological landscape of these inanimate objects into the open. In Alter Ego, for example, two identical porcelain figurines face one another in a mirrored configuration. This double portrait invokes the uncanny not solely through resemblance, but from their mutual gaze. The figures observe one another, collapsing the distinction between viewer and viewed.
Miniatures, like those found in dollhouses, also offer the viewer a sense of control and power. While women of the household historically lacked authority over their domestic lives, the miniature world allowed for a kind of omnipotence. Quinn’s small resin sculptures remind us both of what has been gained and how far we still have to go. Representations of women, like the figurines Quinn repurposes, have long occupied a position somewhere between subject and object. There has been little space for woman as viewer, and ample space for woman as image. Insight confronts this asymmetry directly. By mobilizing the uncanny, domestic artifacts, and mirrored acts of looking,Quinn illustrates a feminist aesthetic in which female subjectivity is neither passive nor fixed, but recursive, reflective, and self-determining.