“As I look around Emily’s canvases, my attraction—to the stage-lighting, the jewel tones, the quietude, the tranquility of the paint—is contradicted by a feeling of wariness. It’s mysterious, the way the fern-like plants in My Tapestry II bulge, as if filled with an unseen liquid. It’s unsettling, the way their leaves intersect, like fingers, expressing sentient tenderness, or worse, the mindless ambition of an invasive species, growing wherever it finds an opportunity. The pots in Waiting don’t appear large enough to sustain the life climbing out of them, and the way the vines grow in a standard grid pattern is almost as bizarre as the exactitude with which their purple skin matches the walls to which they attach. They are clearly imagined and imagined clearly, clarified surfaces giving little indication as to the mechanisms behind their behavior. There is an insurmountable distance between my rationale and theirs; everything Emily paints seems to have a mind of its own.”