GARY EMRICH | Reconciliation

“The video ‘Reconciliation’ continues my decades-long artistic study of water and is a meditation on its dynamic relationship with humanity in the 21^stC. Filmed throughout Europe and North America, the piece explores the interconnected layers of water’s states, forms and functions through a structure inspired by the musical composition of the fugue, with its recurring themes, variations, and counterpoints. In this work, water emerges as both subject and metaphor. The omnipresent water bottle—a modern talisman of convenience and consumption—becomes a motif for our commodification of a once freely flowing resource. Decorative fountains evoke water's aesthetic power and its use as a status symbol. These elements are interwoven to form a visual and emotional polyphony that moves between harmony and dissonance, much like the fugue itself with short musical clips from Bach, Beethoven, Respighi, Shostakovich, and Froberger. At its core, ‘Reconciliation’ is a journey carrying viewers across landscapes shaped by water’s presence or absence, offering glimpses of its beauty, its fragility, and its exploitation. As themes repeat and evolve, the piece asks: How do we foster a deeper awareness of water’s significance in our shared existence?

This work is not a call to action but an invitation to contemplation. By framing water a visual elegy with fugue accompaniments, I seek to honor water’s complexity and provoke deeper awareness of its role in our lives. In creating the video, my goal is to inspire a sense of responsibility and a renewed reverence for water—an element that sustains us, connects us, and reflects the precarious reconciliation between humanity and the environment.”

- Gary Emrich

In his sixth Robischon Gallery solo exhibition Gary Emrich returns with new work exemplifying his career-long pursuit of experimentation in image-making. For the “All Consumed” series works, the artist inventively merges the abstract with a new kind of symbolic narrative by utilizing the commonplace packaging of water bottles for his overtly abstract compositions. Inspired by the light-reflecting properties of the plastic forms and the inherent wholesomeness of the commercial imagery used, Emrich’s intent focuses on the commodification of water in the face of its scarcity or waste. In this exhibition, the artist adds international imagery to the series further universally accentuating and questioning the consumer-orientated aspects surrounding his subject by altering and reconfiguring how bottled water may also be perceived. In a dizzying array of brightly colored packaging, the diminishing and vital liquid resource is typically pitched as pristine and abundant with visions of snow-covered peaks, rushing mountain streams and lush forests. The bold graphic elements and appealing labels provide the artist with abundant conceptual imagery for his elaborate, process-driven approach even as brand-specific, pudgy Czech Cupids and rocky towers might not be so recognizable to American audiences. An outlined heart shape on the label from the desert nation of the UAE implies a symbolic cross-cultural universality illustrating the marketing bottled water desirability.

Elaborating on his process, Emrich states, “’All Consumed’ is a series of landscape photographs fabricated from bottled water packaging and water-filled, clear molded plastic ‘blister packs.’ These constructions are shot with a view camera, freeing them from digital manipulation and enabling the imagery to be enlarged to a large scale. As part of the project, I invert the value of the things we buy by preserving and elevating the disposable and ubiquitous packaging and plastics we throw away, to make trash an object of desire and beauty. ‘All Consumed’ addresses the impact of effective branding by the bottled water industry on consumers as we move toward the inevitability of water as a commodity worldwide.”

The new video, Reconciliation, affirms Emrich’s contemplative, deeply felt reverence for water as a vital resource manifesting in many forms at sites in the US and beyond. In consideration, the artist merges evocative images of Nature – a delicate leaf twirling on a spider web, unspoiled passing landscapes of abundance and raindrops rippling on water – with less appealing images of empty plastic bottles caught in lapping waves or absurdly bobbing along Venice’s Grand Canal. The artist’s hands appear to splash in the sink, reflect autumn leaves on a tablet device or reach to remove wayward cast-off bottles to remind the viewer of the ever-present human connection to the bottles as trash.  A worker cleans algae-green water with a broom and even more water from the Trevi Fountain in Rome – after being inundated at the site with tourists who have come to experience the sculpture of the allegorical figures of Oceanus, Abundance and Health. All the while, a piano score reverberates as an animated snippet appears from the artwork of German artist Thomas Demand and a label transformed into a flag with the empty vessel as its staff flaps in the breeze. Each disparate image relates fully to water in Emrich’s narrative. Expressive in form and light-suffused palettes, the video and surrounding photographs become amplified in a visually engaging and culturally complex meditation. Emrich’s insightful series prompts an awareness about the consumption of a vanishing global resource through poetic intent and the unifying, expansive lens of abstraction.

Gary Emrich has an M.F.A. from the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.A. from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and studied at the University of Lancaster, Lancaster, England. He has received numerous recognitions, including numerous public and private commissions: Private Commission for Sage Hospitality, Denver; Public Art Commission, City of Denver; COVisions Fellowship in Media Arts, Colorado Council on the Arts; Creative Fellowship in Media Arts, Colorado Council on the Arts; Production Grant, Western States Regional Media Arts; Showcase Video Award, 14th Atlanta Film and Video Festival; Production Grant, Western States Regional Media Arts; Public Art Purchase, State of Colorado; Director’s Grant, Colorado Council on the Arts; Collaboration Grant, Colorado Council on the Arts; and Artists in Education, Colorado Council on the Arts. His work is in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, University of Colorado Art Museum, Film Arts Anthology, New York, Belger Museum, Kansas City, MO, Detroit Zoological Society, Continental Illinois National Bank of Chicago, the State of Colorado, the City and County of Denver, the State of Colorado, and many notable private collections. Emrich’s work has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Dairy Arts Center, Boulder, SFO Museum in San Francisco, University Art Gallery at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Arvada Center of Arts and Humanities, Metropolitan State College, Denver and further group shows at honorable institutions such as the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, Dallas Art Museum, Osaka Photo College in Japan, Bemis Center in Omaha, Singer Gallery Mizel Arts Center, and many other notable venues.