Artists > Emily Lindskoog, Making Arrangements November 6 - December 2, 2024 Website|emily-lindskoog.com| |@emilylindskoog|

Making Arrangements
In the last year of his life, my dad was taking four pink chemotherapy pills every day. If his kidneys were suffering or his bloodwork looked iffy, he would need to cut back or delay. Otherwise, he would take them for three weeks with one week to rest between each stretch of doses. “A maintenance drug”, his doctor called it, with the shared understanding that a cure was off the table. Longevity was the new goal, and my dad chased it with everything he could. On each day he was well enough to take a dose, he would arrange his pills in the palm of his hand or atop nearby objects in a sort of pictogram, which he’d photograph, title, and text to the family – an invitation to participate in his treatment and share his final stage of life.

I started archiving these text messages almost right away. At the height of Covid, while teaching art classes online from a small apartment with two kids under four, this archive became nearly the full extent of my studio practice. I was grateful for his project for many reasons, and I told him so over the phone one day. He replied, “I think there’s something for you here, Emily.”

And there was. After he died, I started thinking about all the ways we were making arrangements as a family. My dad’s pills, our collage, drawing, and music compositions, the arrangements for a new baby, and finally... end of life and funeral arrangements, the flower arrangements delivered almost daily, and the sorting of my dad’s 71 years’ worth of objects.

Included in this exhibition is a book that compiles the 484 pills arranged in the 131 photographs that my dad texted to us. In conversation with his compositions are my own pieces that take their cues from FaceTime screenshots and other pictures shared back and forth from Phoenix to Chicago. My dad would send pictures of hospital rooms or progress updates on their house rebuild, and I would send pictures of my living room, overwhelmed by toys and forts. Then came my mom’s pictures documenting the daily tasks of sorting sympathy cards, piles of paperwork, and my dad’s clothes in the house that she now lived in alone.

My previous methods of creating unfixed collages in early motherhood have taken on new, deeper layers of meaning in grief. Like a camera roll creates a flattened space, the paper serves as a shared stage that collapses the time between two objects: a one-million-year-old rock and a broken plastic taillight are now together in a new existence, pointing to the cosmic interconnectedness of all things and the miracle of having a conscious life on this planet. The biggest events can deliver a new way of making, a new symbolic language, and sometimes, a new way of seeing. I hope there’s something for you here, too, dear reader.

-Emily Lindskoog
Emily Lindskoog lives and works in Chicago, where she is also helping to raise two small children. She received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. She has participated in many group exhibitions, including Heaven Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, Roman Susan Gallery, Circle Contemporary, T. Mari, and St. Mary’s College, as well as solo exhibitions at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Material Exhibitions, Carlson Tower Gallery and Parallax Art Lab. Emily was a SPARC (Seniors Pairing with Artists in Residence Citywide) grant recipient through the Brooklyn Arts Council, a resident in Chicago Artist Coalition’s Field/Work residency, and participated in the inaugural Pollinator residency. She founded her own Love Road Artist Residency in 2018, a nomadic, annual residency for artist-mothers. She currently works as the gallery director and assistant professor of art at North Park University.

ARTIST STATEMENT
Taking cues from my environment, found objects, repeated movements, and family photos, I discover a network of formal patterns and coincidences, intersections in time, and a connection between all things.

The birth of my two children and the death of my dad hold prominent positions in my mixed-media drawings and collages. In work I refer to as unfixed collage (alluding to the objects' arrangement on a horizontal paper surface without adhesive) I can play with and re-stage the work. The resulting composition is committed while maintaining the energy of moveable parts. These artworks could be the site of an archaeological dig, an altar, or a board game still in play.

Oil pastel and charcoal drawings, watercolors, and mixed media on paper contain bright colors and energetic mark-making, reinforcing the sense of playful symbolism. The bold shapes feel familiar yet unknown - perhaps an ancient symbol or a balled-up sock. Sharing space with two small children while grieving the loss of a close family member makes time-travel seem entirely possible; everything feels both permanent and precarious, instantaneous and eternal, funny and deadly serious. The gestures of stacking, sorting, and rearranging follow me into my studio, where I’m again confronted with a question from the children: What is this?