WINTER SATURDAYS ARE FOR SPRING
Karen Emenhiser-Harris + Susan Knight, 2020
Digital Exhibition 12
"The house was U-shaped, with a patio facing south – looking out to the flat-topped Pedernal mountain. There were smooth above plastered walls, buff-colored flagstones laid out across the courtyard with silver-green sagebrush set against the sky. There was a simplicity in the courtyard. Just a few skulls and pelvis bones on a cedar shelf, a small bell ringing in the breeze, some flagstone tables with her favorite rocks. Red rocks and black obsidian, river rocks, and a stone once used for grinding corn. Neatly stacked piñon wood for the various fireplaces in the house. Inside there was a whiteness all around – white walls, white-stained floors and ceilings, simple white cotton curtains."
- Juan Hamilton, “In O’Keeffe’s World.” Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters, Jack Cowart, Juan Hamilton (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1987) 7.
Karen Emenhiser-Harris + Susan Knight, 2020
Digital Exhibition 12
"The house was U-shaped, with a patio facing south – looking out to the flat-topped Pedernal mountain. There were smooth above plastered walls, buff-colored flagstones laid out across the courtyard with silver-green sagebrush set against the sky. There was a simplicity in the courtyard. Just a few skulls and pelvis bones on a cedar shelf, a small bell ringing in the breeze, some flagstone tables with her favorite rocks. Red rocks and black obsidian, river rocks, and a stone once used for grinding corn. Neatly stacked piñon wood for the various fireplaces in the house. Inside there was a whiteness all around – white walls, white-stained floors and ceilings, simple white cotton curtains."
- Juan Hamilton, “In O’Keeffe’s World.” Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters, Jack Cowart, Juan Hamilton (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1987) 7.
To get through the winter we forage.
To get through the winter we search.
To get through the winter we ask for the bare essentials.
Starches, cans, and jars fill our basements.
The stuff that might just get us to the spring.
However, those are the things that feed our body.
Provide our stomach with just enough to bury its echo.
But, what about our mind?
But, what about our emotions?
But, what about our feelings?
What are we doing to strengthen our happiness?
What are we doing to provide ourselves with the need for playfulness and optimism?
What are we doing to look at winter and see warmth?
‘Winter Saturdays are for Spring’ is a very personal outlook on the act of making within intimacy.
‘Winter Saturdays are for Spring’ is about shyness.
‘Winter Saturdays are for Spring’ is about making our own perception of reality.
‘Winter Saturdays are for Spring’ is a way of working through a time period that is difficult.
‘Winter Saturdays are for Spring’ is a poetic story of two artists who cast light onto a shadow.
‘Winter Saturdays are for Spring’ looks ahead as a marker for future springs to come early, even during the harshest of winters.
To get through the winter we search.
To get through the winter we ask for the bare essentials.
Starches, cans, and jars fill our basements.
The stuff that might just get us to the spring.
However, those are the things that feed our body.
Provide our stomach with just enough to bury its echo.
But, what about our mind?
But, what about our emotions?
But, what about our feelings?
What are we doing to strengthen our happiness?
What are we doing to provide ourselves with the need for playfulness and optimism?
What are we doing to look at winter and see warmth?
‘Winter Saturdays are for Spring’ is a very personal outlook on the act of making within intimacy.
‘Winter Saturdays are for Spring’ is about shyness.
‘Winter Saturdays are for Spring’ is about making our own perception of reality.
‘Winter Saturdays are for Spring’ is a way of working through a time period that is difficult.
‘Winter Saturdays are for Spring’ is a poetic story of two artists who cast light onto a shadow.
‘Winter Saturdays are for Spring’ looks ahead as a marker for future springs to come early, even during the harshest of winters.
Self-isolated viewing of WINTER SATURDAYS ARE FOR SPRING in Little Italy, Omaha:
Photos Courtesy of Dan Schwalm
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Photos Courtesy of Karen Emenhiser-Harris & Susan Knight
Karen Emenhiser-Harris & Susan Knight Studio Visits:
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Photos Courtesy of Mike Nesbit
Email conversation between Karen Emenhiser-Harris, Susan Knight, and Mike Nesbit regarding this digital exhibition:
About the Artists:
Karen Emenhiser-Harris was born in Oklahoma, the daughter of an artist and frustrated writer. Her great aunt Edith Maida was a poet and founder of a spiritual colony near Los Angeles. Karen studied art at the University of Oklahoma, then went to Dallas and showed some work and started writing about art, first for the Deep Ellum Review, then for the Dallas Observer. Emenhiser-Harris edited the founding edition of Circa, then moved to western New York with her husband to open a new University gallery.
In general, Karen's aesthetic leans on longtime visual and emotional associations with vast stretches of unoccupied terrain. While living in Dallas, she drove west whenever possible. Most people avoid driving through that much desert, but Karen always felt a great sense of awe at the unadorned sight of earth meeting sky. Later on, Emenhiser-Harris found herself in the Midwest surrounded on all sides by prairie or corn. Karen has particularly vivid memories of her first drive through rural Iowa, astonished and somewhat alarmed with the way the howling winds sculpted the snow— its keen-edged glistening and hard-packed glow.
The paintings/objects Emenhiser-Harris makes now embody moments and memories, somewhat tangential, of these spaces. She usually avoids focal points. The objects hang on the wall; slightly misshaped, mostly frontal with polished or gilded sides designed to lead the eye elsewhere, and presenting a sort of shyness and sensitivity.
www.emenhiserharris.com
Omaha-based painter, paper and installation artist, Susan Knight is a native of Michigan. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows and installations nationally, including Bank of America Headquarters, Charlotte, NC, Johnson and Johnson Headquarters, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Garrison Art Center, Garrison, New York. Internationally she has shown in China, Ireland, Italy, and Canada. She has twice been featured in Sci Art in America Online Magazine. Her work appears in Illuminations Poems Inspired by Science by Robert Louis Chianese and in 2016 was reviewed by Sculpture Magazine and Smithsonian Online Magazine.
Among her honors, Knight is a recipient of a Nebraska Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship. In 2013 she was chosen by The Colorado Art Ranch and The Nature Conservancy for a “Land/Water” residency at Carpenter Ranch, Hayden, CO and was awarded artist residencies at Ragdale, Lake Forest, Illinois in 1997 and 2009 and at the International School of Art, Montecastello di Vibio, Italy, in 1999. She earned a BFA in art from Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana, and attended The University of Notre Dame, The Glassell School of Art, Houston, and The School of the Chicago Art Institute.
www.susanknightart.com
Karen Emenhiser-Harris was born in Oklahoma, the daughter of an artist and frustrated writer. Her great aunt Edith Maida was a poet and founder of a spiritual colony near Los Angeles. Karen studied art at the University of Oklahoma, then went to Dallas and showed some work and started writing about art, first for the Deep Ellum Review, then for the Dallas Observer. Emenhiser-Harris edited the founding edition of Circa, then moved to western New York with her husband to open a new University gallery.
In general, Karen's aesthetic leans on longtime visual and emotional associations with vast stretches of unoccupied terrain. While living in Dallas, she drove west whenever possible. Most people avoid driving through that much desert, but Karen always felt a great sense of awe at the unadorned sight of earth meeting sky. Later on, Emenhiser-Harris found herself in the Midwest surrounded on all sides by prairie or corn. Karen has particularly vivid memories of her first drive through rural Iowa, astonished and somewhat alarmed with the way the howling winds sculpted the snow— its keen-edged glistening and hard-packed glow.
The paintings/objects Emenhiser-Harris makes now embody moments and memories, somewhat tangential, of these spaces. She usually avoids focal points. The objects hang on the wall; slightly misshaped, mostly frontal with polished or gilded sides designed to lead the eye elsewhere, and presenting a sort of shyness and sensitivity.
www.emenhiserharris.com
Omaha-based painter, paper and installation artist, Susan Knight is a native of Michigan. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows and installations nationally, including Bank of America Headquarters, Charlotte, NC, Johnson and Johnson Headquarters, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Garrison Art Center, Garrison, New York. Internationally she has shown in China, Ireland, Italy, and Canada. She has twice been featured in Sci Art in America Online Magazine. Her work appears in Illuminations Poems Inspired by Science by Robert Louis Chianese and in 2016 was reviewed by Sculpture Magazine and Smithsonian Online Magazine.
Among her honors, Knight is a recipient of a Nebraska Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship. In 2013 she was chosen by The Colorado Art Ranch and The Nature Conservancy for a “Land/Water” residency at Carpenter Ranch, Hayden, CO and was awarded artist residencies at Ragdale, Lake Forest, Illinois in 1997 and 2009 and at the International School of Art, Montecastello di Vibio, Italy, in 1999. She earned a BFA in art from Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana, and attended The University of Notre Dame, The Glassell School of Art, Houston, and The School of the Chicago Art Institute.
www.susanknightart.com