Meaningful play: Emily Counts at Oregon Contemporary

Counts' installation with its humanoid and animal sculptures is unabashedly feminine and whimsical. It equally defies easy categorization.
Sea of Vapors by Emily Counts, 2024, installation view, photo by Mario Gallucci

Sea of Vapors by Tacoma-based artist Emily Counts astonishes by merging otherworldliness with the deeply familiar materiality of this earthly realm. Counts, who is represented by Nationale in Oregon and studio e gallery in Washington, has managed to create detailed life-sized (and, in some cases, even larger-than-life-sized) figures that read as humanoid, animalistic, and plant-like. Her exhibition fills the main gallery of Oregon Contemporary, greeting visitors first with colorful characters that stand on an octagonal platform facing outwards. In a nook separated by a partial wall presides the Wizard Queen, who is larger than the rest and nestled among a decadent array of delights and indulgences. In this work, Counts presents feminine fantasies, those that blossom most fervently during girlhood. The aesthetic is easy to infantilize – to write off as excessive, insubstantial, or both. Yet Sea of Vapors effectively rejects this kind of oversimplification. 

Curator Blake Shell describes this body of work as a kind of “matrilineal heritage,” a reflection of many different individual influences on Counts. Twelve humanoid figures wear intricate regalia with animal “familiars”—harkening to the supportive presence of supernatural companions in folklore—sitting stoically beside them. Sensual flowers and fruit pop up around these characters, some of which look like phalluses with daisy heads. All these entities appear frozen in time awaiting animation by some magic or energetic shift, at once holding down and charging the space through their stillness. They possess a range of faculties for perception and sensation, eyes or mouths that emanate a warm glow or petals and stems that reach and drip. They appear to both project and receive information. 

Mysteries Familiar (left) and Winter Familiar (right), photo by Mario Gallucci

Consulting the works list, I learn Counts has given names and certain roles to these characters, which deepens the intrigue about their construction and positioning. Red Queen, for instance, is a humanoid being of glazed stoneware dressed in a poppy blouse and skirt with gold luster accents. This character has no arms, only hollow puffed sleeves. Two detached golden hands rest on the character’s low abdomen, prying open a triangular hole within. This hole would lead to reproductive organs on a human, but in this instance, it leads to a curious glowing pink light. Red Queen’s face, like the others in this show, is adorned with a unique arrangement of orifices: mouth-over-eye on its right and eye-over-nose on its left.

Red Queen, image detail, photo by Mario Gallucci

Twinkling ambient music that feels out of time threads throughout, orchestrated by Party Store aka. Josh Machniak. The stylized vintage phones, garments, and hairstyles of the figures on the octagonal platform gesture to the 1950s and 1980s, touching into pop cultural references of today including the singular looks, at once futuristic and vintage, of redhead musical artist Chappell Roan and the late SOPHIE. The exhibition also harkens to the retro set design of the recent romantic comedy horror movie, Lisa Frankenstein, full of curves and lush color.

The chromatics of Counts’ works cohere intuitively. Her palette ranges from light and deep blues, to mauve, magenta, and vermillion. The humanoid figure On Hold is powder blue all over, standing forlornly with a phone tucked between ear and shoulder, and arms crossed, waiting. A withered pale blue little cat, Waking Familiar, lays nearby, maybe dead or even undead, with a flower growing from its torso. Similar elements of melancholia and horror crop up across the whole of the exhibition.

Though not a hard and fast rule of every element, this show does find a level of balance through sets and even numbers, such as the pairings of one animal familiar for every life-sized humanoid and the eight-sided platform to hold them up. 

Spiders and the tensegrity of their webs emerge as a common theme, harkening again to the genre of horror—the feminine superpower of weaving across tenuous touchstones to create something strong, supportive and even lethal. Spider Lights stands with wide V-shaped legs of pink woodwork—a stance Shell aptly describes as “exuding power without control or violence.” This figure boasts a glistening stoneware upper body and round mirrored glass for a face, which glows on and off with light. When glowing, the reflective quality of the glass exterior is disrupted to reveal what is protected behind it: an ornate spider that resides inside this figure’s head.

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Sea of Vapors, installation view of Wizard Queen, photo by Mario Gallucci

Around the corner of an inconspicuous wall resides the larger-than-life Wizard Queen, decorated in shimmering garb, with an eclectic entourage—plush oversized fruits, a large morel mushroom, a goblet of golden luster, a glimmering dagger, and four oversized tubes of lipstick. Wizard Queen wears a tall pointed crown and reclines in a position as if perhaps giving birth. Two plush moths hover on either side in a heraldic composition. Mystical sound emanates from between Wizard Queen’s legs and a video of a spider weaving its web plays, embedded within the abdomen. Perhaps Wizard Queen is the most timeless of the characters, like a fecund mother tree drawing together life forces that thrive in connection to it. 

Sea of Vapors makes no ploys at pointed concept, instead leaning into fantasies so exquisite no explication or reasoning for its existence is warranted. With the help of a small crew, a hired woodworker and a ceramics intern, Counts has managed to render her works with revelry in every detail, accomplishing feats of craft that demand respect while claiming agency for her imagination. In conjuring many associations to popular culture, both of yesteryear and today, this exacting exhibition reminds of an invitation from the 2015 horror movie The VVitch, a call to embrace the fearsome and decadent aspects of femme fantasy: “Would you like to live deliciously?”

***

Emily Counts’ Sea of Vapors is on view at Oregon Contemporary through February 9, 2025. Oregon Contemporary is located at 8371 N. Interstate Ave and is open Friday-Sunday from noon-5pm (and by appointment).

Hannah Krafcik (they/them) is a Portland-based interdisciplinary neuroqueer artist and writer whose work emerges from ongoing reflections on social patterning and censorship, (over)stimulation, perseveration, and intuition. Their practices span dance, writing, new media, and sound design. Hannah continues to be influenced by their collaboration with artistic partner Emily Jones.
Photo credit: Jo Silver

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