Emily Legleitner - want and fear

MFA thesis, University of Alberta, 2023

"You are full of want and fear."
Etching on Hahnemühle Copperplate printed with 4 colours. 36x60in (91x152cm). 2022.

want and fear, is about mortality, choice, and longing as those constructs relate to the human experience and our contemporary age. More specifically, this body of work explores how these themes manifest in private and personal experiences, told through auto-biographical visual narrative. The imagery originates from spontaneous performative play – I ‘sketch’ in front of a camera with a remote shutter and capture reenactments and responses to feelings of intense emotion. I combine these self-portraits with exaggerations of possible realities, distorting familiar domestic objects to challenge comfort, evoke tension, and create a sense of teetering between conflicting emotions. Because many of the works are made in the artist’s image, want and fear presents microcosmic manifestations of anxiety and vulnerability from an embodied feminine and queer perspective, in varying degrees.

But, want and fear also speaks to anxiety on a macrocosmic level. The work deals in contradictions – as anxiety and choice-making are often accompanied by contradictory feelings. Home can be comforting and confining; love can be wonderfully joyous and terribly painful; labour and work can be rewarding, and at the same time feel distracting, keeping us from things we’d rather be doing. Through printed imagery and installation art, I present moments when the familiar edges towards the unnerving, a sensation that has become more familiar to many of us as we navigate our current and complex global reality – saturated with a constant stream of information, largely devastating, highlighting our dying planet, patterns of genocide, and self-inflicted extinction. As we grapple with uncertainty in the wake of several global crisis and the intimidating, often intangible, vastness of it all, our sense of “normalcy” has been shaken, reinforcing our predisposition to dwell on the fleeting nature of life and longing – the essence of this exhibition, want and fear.

Left: Title wall for want and fear, MFA thesis exhibition, FAB Gallery, University of Alberta,
October 10 – November 3, 2023

Right: Installation of "We are eaten up by nothing" (2023), "I know less now than I knew then" (2023), and "I'll journey through by the strength of my father's laughter" (2021)

Installation of "I'll journey through by the strength of my father's laughter" (2021), "I will nestle myself within your hunger for the ground" (2021), and "My room was the size of my life" (2022)