Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.
–Nathaniel  Hawthorne

It is not just the object, but its history, its veritable shadow, that John Emery sets out to record in his work.   With great precision and yet a lightness of touch, Emery reconstructs with watercolor and paper the worn and common bits of life from two sides of the world.  The results are a bit like magic.

These things that we leave behind, whether commonplace or noble, haunt us:  they are full of memories, dreams, and stories real and imagined.  Emery has an eye for picking out these elegiac fragments.  At times they are literally in pieces: the shattered porcelain, the cast-off apple core, the animal skull.  Even when whole, objects are worn with repeated use, reflecting time’s passage.   In reclaiming them for his curious tromp l’oiel still life constructions, he conjures them into a new world.

Like life itself, each work resonates with both the story and history associated with some objects, and the imagined potential of others.

–Eileen Carr