Virginia Billeaud Anderson
Emily Sloan added a new biographical statement to her exhibition announcements. You can see it in the press release she issued for Funeral for the Living, her performance at 14 Pews to take place on January 1. Following a summary of exhibition and curatorial experiences, and background information declaring she is “internationally unknown” and “survived” her East Texas childhood, Sloan’s biography now states that “one of her greatest accomplishments has been learning to dance despite an upbringing in which it was against her family’s religion.”
Although tempted to, it is simplistic to view Sloan’s art as a type of exorcism of a repressive childhood. She certainly draws from her past, but within the wider context of exploring certain rituals and traditions by establishing an environment for viewer participation. Performances that seem like lunacy are in fact serious meditations on societal norms, backed up by strenuous research. Now that she’s appended the “learning to dance” element to her biography, I thought it would be interesting look closely at Sloan’s work, through the lens of a few facts she revealed about her life.
A good place to begin this profile is with a conversation Sloan and I had about the time she exhibited sculpture in Flying Solo, a seven artist show at Art League. She told me she had been dancing, which she described as therapeutic, that dance put her in touch with her body in a way she had never been. She was amused to recall that her sister “got caught” dancing. “It was just in a country and western club,” Sloan said, but with Church of Christ upbringing and Abeline Christian University restrictions on booze and dancing, it was sinful for her sister to be shaking a leg in a kicker joint. “They made her sit in church and go to an AA meeting.”
Sloan is one of Houston’s most important performance artists. When performing Carrie A. Nation, or a Eulogy Deaconess in Funeral for the Living, or the abusive authority figure in Please Don’t Tell My Parents, she becomes the character totally. I asked her once if she had theatrical training, acting or dancing, to account for her comfort with performance. She said she played the clarinet and piano, and performed in recitals as a child, had always dreamed of taking dance lessons, “but it was against my family’s religious beliefs.”
The last time I saw Sloan immerse herself in a role was August 25, 2012 when she performed Is that a Baby Ruth in the Swimming Pool? in the pool behind Darke Gallery. There was a Baby Ruth chocolate bar on the pool step, the old turd-in-the-water joke, and nearby floated Sloan, her entire body wrapped in black cloth. Because she was so still, and the black cloth disguised her, I could not be entirely certain it wasn’t a dummy. The performance’s duration was also baffling. How did she float that many hours without peeing in Linda Darke’s pool?
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Emily Sloan, Is that a Baby Ruth in the Swimming Pool, 2012, Performance
Since audience reaction is a primary component of Sloan’s performance art, it was interesting to watch the people standing around the pool. Some stared silently at the pool and departed soon after having a few beers, others avoided looking at the black thing floating in the pool through chatty interaction with others. In his review of Baby Ruth for Pan, Dean Liscum found the audiences’ role to be surprisingly undefined for a Sloan performance, so he “decided to define his own role and placed a mini Baby Ruth on Sloan’s chest. After I initiated interacting with Sloan, another attendee put pink sunglasses on her,” Liscum wrote.
Baby Ruth might sound idiotic, but it is part of Sloan’s examinations of rituals that involve water, and like Water, Water, Fresh and Clear, contains the elements of washing and immersion, “re-birthing people,” Sloan calls it. Baptismal connotations are present in other performances, such as Rebirth, an immersion ritual that took place in the back of a pickup truck in August 2012. When she presented Southern Naptist Convention in California for the Venice Beach Biennale, Reverend Emily stated “Southern California’s and specifically Venice’s abundance of muscle, sand, and proximity to water make it a perfect site for sharing healthful and relaxing blessed rest and immersion if needed.” The notion of water also surfaces in Sloan’s Carrie Nation performances. “Water, water, fresh and clear” is one of Carrie’s temperance chants.
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Emily Sloan, Rebirth, 2012, Performance photo by Michael Brims
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Emily Sloan, Water Break, 2012, Photo by Emily Sloan
On the evening of March 10, 2012, Carrie Nation and her temperance acolytes gathered outside Houston’s Notsuoh Bar to rescue the drunkards inside from Satan. Dressed in Victorian mourning clothes, they made loud banging noise on instruments and screamed anti-drink propaganda into megaphones, “Demon rum,” “Put down that beer,” “Drinkers reform,” “Don’t let Satan’s juice touch your lips,” “Follow us,” and “Save yourself,” and created such a ruckus the neighboring proprietor ran over to assure Jim Pirtle that if these people cause you to lose your license I’ll help you fight it. A few Notsuoh patrons who are unaware that Sloan was performing “Carrie” as part of the Lone Star Performance Explosion, Houston’s Performance Biennale, were pissed about the yelling. Surely they had never witnessed a “hachetation.” That’s when Carrie takes her hatchet to the booze bottles. “Renounce the devil, renounce the devil,” she screamed while the glass flew.
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Emily Sloan, Carrie A. Nation’s Hatchetation, 2012, Carrie Nation performance photos by Herb Melichar and Alex Barber.
There is a bit of religiosity in the real Carrie Nation’s fanatic use of violence. The woman had the ability to mesmerize followers like a cult leader, and more than once was arrested for violence. “I felt invincible. My strength was that of a giant. God was certainly standing by me. I smashed five saloons with rocks before I ever took a hatchet,” the real Carrie A. Nation wrote. “She was into violence,” Sloan said, “but drinking was worse? She owned slaves, and destroyed people’s property.”
Research for Funeral for the Living was no less exhaustive. Sloan studied death rituals, and researched eulogies and “home” wakes. She interviewed the director of the funeral museum several times to learn about death practices and rituals. “It is one of several ritual projects I utilize in my art practice as an ongoing exercise to explore healing and death rituals. The audience participates in actions encouraging realizations of the brevity of life and aiding in connecting to the present,” Sloan published as an artist statement for the funeral party.
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Emily Sloan, Funeral for the Living, 2011, Performance image courtesy of 14 Pews.
Sloan performed Funeral for the Living, “the living wake,” she calls it, on the first day of January 2011 at 14 Pews. The solemn event included a casket, a brass band, booze, pot luck casseroles, and a funeral pyre in the back yard, “so participants could say good-bye to addictions, jobs, bras, lovers, and hemorrhoids, other things,” said Sloan who presided over the service and delivered a “eulogy for art.” “Eulogy Writing Deaconesses” helped participants write their own eulogies if they desired, and read eulogies if participants desired.
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Emily Sloan, Funeral for the Living, 2011, Performance image courtesy of 14 Pews.
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Emily Sloan, Funeral for the Living, 2011, Pulling hair to express grief dates back to antiquity. You can see it on Greek vases. Performance image courtesy of 14 Pews.
Sloan blesses and officiates, and even became ordained to perform marriages. I asked her if her talent for pious carrying on relates to her past. “Maybe I do explore my past, being brought up religious,” she said. Carrie made up her own religion around drinking. I made up mine on napping, and the funeral rituals, perhaps I’m trying to re-create something religious.”
“We need spirituality,” she told me in a separate conversation.
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Emily Sloan, Funeral for the Living, 2011, Performance image courtesy of 14 Pews.
The “napture” was fast approaching so it was imperative the word be spread. Cressandra Thibodeaux of 14 Pews created a promo video to help publicize Reverend Emily’s message that salvation could be gained by way of the Southern Naptist Convention which was to take place concurrently with the real southern Baptist convention. Sloan who wore minister robes invited the unsaved to come forward and be “naptized,” to profess their belief in the benefits of napping, and their commitment to napping, and warned that the un-saved could be “trapped in insomniatic hell.” Michael Galbreth (The Art Guy) came forth to give testimony. He wants to be saved and is getting naptized, “I do want to be prepared for the napture regardless, and I think it’s better to be naptized just in case.” Furniture store clown Matress Mac in his typical motor mouth style warned of the napture, “Hi, this is Matress Mac. Don’t get left awake! Don’t get left awake!”
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Emily Sloan, Southern Naptist Convention, 2011, Photo by Nick De la Torre
Southern Naptist Convention took place in 2011 at 14 Pews and again in 2012 in California. But the Universal Nap Church has been evolving ever since Sloan began “napping” performances, of which over 50 have been performed. I witnessed Napping Affects Performance at Art League in June of 2010. In a gallery made dark with covered windows there were cots with sheets and pillows available for restorative sleep. Sloan presided over the congregation. The day I attended she wore a white clinician’s coat and held a clip board, and put her finger to her lips to silence anyone disrespectful enough to disturb the napping. There were appointment cards, “Your NAP appointment is set for _____. To re-schedule or cancel an appointment – call (number).” Some brilliantly newspaper art write got all excited about the “immaculate sheets and fresh pillows.”
Emily Sloan, Southern Naptist Convention promo video, 2011
Research, Sloan said, revealed that naps and siestas were practically eliminated with the industrial revolution and the invention of the light bulb, and that humans are the only animals on a lengthy waking cycle, and it’s known that napping significantly improves performance. Prior to this she had begun establishing the Universal Nap church. Sloan researched religious congregations and recalled “my own Church of Christ experience” and that scripture says where two or more are gathered, you have a church. Sloan translated a parable about 7 trumpets into 7 blankets and began writing her own sermons based on parables.
“Southern Naptist Convention evolved out of Napping Affects Performance, and then turned into a spiritual movement. Let he who falls asleep in church cast the first pillow,” Sloan told me.
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Emily Sloan, Napping Affects Performance, 2010, Art League
Sloan comes to art with heavy academic training gained through two master programs in sculpture, painting and art history. She has built an impressive portfolio of sculpture, video and performance, while tirelessly pursuing curatorial projects that highlight other artists, and continuing to teach. It’s become clear from our talks she’s extremely knowledgeable about the history of art, a rich chapter of which includes the body as an art object. Performance art, which reaches back to Dada events of 1916, began to cross barriers with sculptural use of the body once postmodernism annihilated formal art categories.
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Emily Sloan, Round, Round, 2010, installation view, Photo by Robert Boyd
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Emily Sloan, Snow Globe from Round, Round, 2010, Photo by Robert Boyd
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Emily Sloan, Boudoir Lamps, 2009, Installation at Lawndale Art Center
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Emily Sloan, ShadeCloud, 2011, Outdoor Light Installation at Art League’s Sculpture Garden
The elegant works Sloan exhibited at Darke Gallery in her 2012 solo exhibition Enlight were inspired by mandalas that are part of Buddhist and Hindu religious traditions. Her statement included, “mandalas, concentric diagrams, are used as spiritual teaching tools and as aids to meditation and trance induction. In common use, mandala has become a generic term for any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung saw the mandala as ‘a representation of the unconscious self’, and believed his paintings of mandalas enabled him to identify emotional disorders and work towards wholeness in personality.” Such elevated mining of Jung and Hindu culture seems cohesive with Sloan’s other investigations into ritual and traditions and societal norms.
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Emily Sloan, Mandala, 2012, found metal
How does Sloan’s Diboll Texas family react to her art? They are not entirely thrilled. Sloan said she began making art as a child but her family discouraged it. They viewed it as frivolous. Art was “from the devil” she remembers being told once. “I felt guilty but kept making art.” After obtaining an undergraduate degree in something practical to please them, she entered a masters program in painting and art history on a full scholarship, the point being they did not have to bear the financial burden. Although Sloan believes her art is positive, certain performances upset her family. An East Texas newspaper wrote about it when she performed Second Naptist Convention. “It humiliated my parents, and they were embarrassed to go to church,” Sloan said. She did not set out to hurt them, but “they did not talk to me for a while.”
Along with her families’ discomfort, her art has elicited negative viewer reaction. In fact, some viewers’ responses to Carrie Nation and to warnings about the napture have been down right hostile. Sloan recalled being screamed at for holding a Second Naptist Convention sign “don’t get left awake” during a Halloween “Zombie Walk.” “This is not Sunday, people yelled, as if I was protesting the Zombie walk.” She was treated like a nut case for distributing pamphlets warning of the napture when she performed Second Naptist Convention in California and found it ironic that druggies and perverts at Venice Beach were so intolerant. “People thought I was crazy, crazy. Some ran away from me.” Carrie has been treated disrespectfully. “Just for handing out pamphlets, they treat her like shit, I witnessed people’s other side, their true colors. What if my pamphlet called for gay rights? When I do not speak, they do not know what’s in a pamphlet.”
The most extreme hostility has come from other artists. “During a performance at Diverse Works some peopled screamed 'Fuck You' at my followers. We were simply handing out pamphlets,” Sloan said. She finds the art crowd’s intolerance extremely ironic. “Some performances might have a whole bunch of naked people, and that’s OK but when it’s Carrie she’s treated like crap. Biker gang people were polite, artists less accepting.” Scenarios such as these are precisely what she intends with the art. “It’s not just interesting that people attack, it’s important, a very significant experience,” Sloan told me.
Negativity aside, response has been tremendously positive. Sloan believes her art is enlightening to viewers. Funeral for the Living she considers a powerful tool for healing. “Many people I met for the first time at the event have contacted me to share how it affected them” which is why she is thrilled to be invited by 14 Pews “to make this journey again” on January 1.
The artist herself benefits. She felt delivered from painful memories when she performed “a group marriage” in Fit to be Tied, “I married some men, we had a cake, I got ordained, you can do it online.” Sloan was still dealing with her divorce, she explained, and the performance was like “an exorcism.” It included a ritual of burning a circle of paper inside which she stood. This becomes poignant and raw with the knowledge that she was in an abusive marriage with her life at risk from violence and isolation and awareness that her family would be terribly embarrassed by divorce.
I can’t help but think the video Sloan presented in Lawndale’s 2011 Big Show, Please Don’t Tell my Parents, came out of something painful and in need of personal healing. In it a white female (Sloan) repeatedly spanks a black man’s naked ass. What seems boneheaded and perverse, is in fact as the narrative unfolds, a denouncement of the hypocrisy of lustful, abusive authoritarian figures. It ends with an authoritarian character becoming orgasmic over physical retribution.
The performance Rotational Aesthetics at Lawndale seems dark and desperate as Sloan and another performer struggle in James Ciosek’s “Human Hamster Wheel.” Perhaps it symbolized our existential plight.
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Emily Sloan, Rotational Aesthetics, 2012, Photo by Alex Barber
There can’t be a tradition more irreconcilable, more worthy of Sloan’s investigation, than the art world. It is as outrageous as any religion. Sloan goes after it in the most subtle manner. She is founding director of an exhibition space called the Kenmore. “It is not just another white cube,” her statement reads, “the Kenmore is a small, cold self-run exhibition object measuring approximately 36"x24"x24. Its mission is to keep ideas fresh through providing a unique exhibition context and the experience of collaboration.” The term white cube parodies art galleries just as the lofty language in the formal press releases she issues to announces Kenmore events mock arts’ grandeur.
When it’s not needed to cool her beer, Sloan invites other artists to exhibit in the Kenmore. In March 2012 David McClain exhibited “authentic” vintage porn of famous people. To some she offers short term “residencies” such as the one she gave to Sasha Dela who was Kenmore Artist-in-Residence in July. Sloan paid Dela a residency stipend of $100 and Dela mounted her video monitor on top of the fridge so the beer would stay cool. “People can put their art inside or on the door,” Sloan said. “It was my fridge in graduate school. I bought it from Loli Fernandez.”
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Emily Sloan, The Kenmore, an exhibition object with Kenmore Artist-in-Residence Sasha Dela
A portable object, the Kenmore which usually sits at the Skydive Art Space makes guest appearances at other venues. It’s been in fancy galleries on Colquitt Street, for example, and it appeared in the Venice Beach Biennale. The Kenmore reached a pinnacle when it participated in the Pan Art Fair.
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Emily Sloan, Zarvin Mindler, 2011, with the Kenmore
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Emily Sloan added a new biographical statement to her exhibition announcements. You can see it in the press release she issued for Funeral for the Living, her performance at 14 Pews to take place on January 1. Following a summary of exhibition and curatorial experiences, and background information declaring she is “internationally unknown” and “survived” her East Texas childhood, Sloan’s biography now states that “one of her greatest accomplishments has been learning to dance despite an upbringing in which it was against her family’s religion.”
Although tempted to, it is simplistic to view Sloan’s art as a type of exorcism of a repressive childhood. She certainly draws from her past, but within the wider context of exploring certain rituals and traditions by establishing an environment for viewer participation. Performances that seem like lunacy are in fact serious meditations on societal norms, backed up by strenuous research. Now that she’s appended the “learning to dance” element to her biography, I thought it would be interesting look closely at Sloan’s work, through the lens of a few facts she revealed about her life.
A good place to begin this profile is with a conversation Sloan and I had about the time she exhibited sculpture in Flying Solo, a seven artist show at Art League. She told me she had been dancing, which she described as therapeutic, that dance put her in touch with her body in a way she had never been. She was amused to recall that her sister “got caught” dancing. “It was just in a country and western club,” Sloan said, but with Church of Christ upbringing and Abeline Christian University restrictions on booze and dancing, it was sinful for her sister to be shaking a leg in a kicker joint. “They made her sit in church and go to an AA meeting.”
Sloan is one of Houston’s most important performance artists. When performing Carrie A. Nation, or a Eulogy Deaconess in Funeral for the Living, or the abusive authority figure in Please Don’t Tell My Parents, she becomes the character totally. I asked her once if she had theatrical training, acting or dancing, to account for her comfort with performance. She said she played the clarinet and piano, and performed in recitals as a child, had always dreamed of taking dance lessons, “but it was against my family’s religious beliefs.”
The last time I saw Sloan immerse herself in a role was August 25, 2012 when she performed Is that a Baby Ruth in the Swimming Pool? in the pool behind Darke Gallery. There was a Baby Ruth chocolate bar on the pool step, the old turd-in-the-water joke, and nearby floated Sloan, her entire body wrapped in black cloth. Because she was so still, and the black cloth disguised her, I could not be entirely certain it wasn’t a dummy. The performance’s duration was also baffling. How did she float that many hours without peeing in Linda Darke’s pool?
Emily Sloan, Is that a Baby Ruth in the Swimming Pool, 2012, Performance
Since audience reaction is a primary component of Sloan’s performance art, it was interesting to watch the people standing around the pool. Some stared silently at the pool and departed soon after having a few beers, others avoided looking at the black thing floating in the pool through chatty interaction with others. In his review of Baby Ruth for Pan, Dean Liscum found the audiences’ role to be surprisingly undefined for a Sloan performance, so he “decided to define his own role and placed a mini Baby Ruth on Sloan’s chest. After I initiated interacting with Sloan, another attendee put pink sunglasses on her,” Liscum wrote.
Baby Ruth might sound idiotic, but it is part of Sloan’s examinations of rituals that involve water, and like Water, Water, Fresh and Clear, contains the elements of washing and immersion, “re-birthing people,” Sloan calls it. Baptismal connotations are present in other performances, such as Rebirth, an immersion ritual that took place in the back of a pickup truck in August 2012. When she presented Southern Naptist Convention in California for the Venice Beach Biennale, Reverend Emily stated “Southern California’s and specifically Venice’s abundance of muscle, sand, and proximity to water make it a perfect site for sharing healthful and relaxing blessed rest and immersion if needed.” The notion of water also surfaces in Sloan’s Carrie Nation performances. “Water, water, fresh and clear” is one of Carrie’s temperance chants.
Emily Sloan, Rebirth, 2012, Performance photo by Michael Brims
Emily Sloan, Water Break, 2012, Photo by Emily Sloan
On the evening of March 10, 2012, Carrie Nation and her temperance acolytes gathered outside Houston’s Notsuoh Bar to rescue the drunkards inside from Satan. Dressed in Victorian mourning clothes, they made loud banging noise on instruments and screamed anti-drink propaganda into megaphones, “Demon rum,” “Put down that beer,” “Drinkers reform,” “Don’t let Satan’s juice touch your lips,” “Follow us,” and “Save yourself,” and created such a ruckus the neighboring proprietor ran over to assure Jim Pirtle that if these people cause you to lose your license I’ll help you fight it. A few Notsuoh patrons who are unaware that Sloan was performing “Carrie” as part of the Lone Star Performance Explosion, Houston’s Performance Biennale, were pissed about the yelling. Surely they had never witnessed a “hachetation.” That’s when Carrie takes her hatchet to the booze bottles. “Renounce the devil, renounce the devil,” she screamed while the glass flew.
Emily Sloan, Carrie A. Nation’s Hatchetation, 2012, Carrie Nation performance photos by Herb Melichar and Alex Barber.
Virginia Billeaud Anderson: Emily, that wig!
Emily Sloan: Carrie used to wear a wig, but it would fall off which was embarrassing, so now she just dies it gray.
VBA: How did you come up with the veil, her black dress, and those eyebrows?
ES: I read about it in a Carrie Nation biography. Carrie and her followers wore such clothes. I made it out of fabric and black lace.She painted several portraits of Carrie, Sloan told me, “before transforming myself into her. This attention to her features had an effect on the way I presented myself while channeling her. Initially, I even kept the paintings nearby to refer to while creating her look.”
VBA: Carrie comes from your childhood.
ES: Maybe, partially. In a way she reminds me of my mother who didn’t like drinking. Once friends were drinking at my dad’s cabin and I saw her emptying out full beers. Perhaps it’s based on her. I love drinking, that’s why I have to be Carrie.Sloan admittedly pulled from her “extreme religious upbringing” to create Carrie and other artworks, but stated decisively it is within a broader exploration of rituals and traditions to create an interactive environment. A few examples are Fit to be Tied in which she conducted marriage ceremonies, Funeral for the Living, an investigation of death rites, and, Second Naptist Convention which probes sleep practices as well as the more zealous type of organized religion.
There is a bit of religiosity in the real Carrie Nation’s fanatic use of violence. The woman had the ability to mesmerize followers like a cult leader, and more than once was arrested for violence. “I felt invincible. My strength was that of a giant. God was certainly standing by me. I smashed five saloons with rocks before I ever took a hatchet,” the real Carrie A. Nation wrote. “She was into violence,” Sloan said, “but drinking was worse? She owned slaves, and destroyed people’s property.”
VBA: Did you compose the temperance material for Carrie’s pamphlet?
ES: I can’t remember, I’ve drank a lot since then.
VBA: Me too.
ES: Yes, I researched and wrote it, but some of it came from Carrie’s devoted follower (rumored to be smitten with her), David McClain, Esq. “Put away the wine glass, put away the beer, water, water, fresh and clear,” he wrote that, and some other stuff.According to Sloan it required quite a bit of historical and biographical research to nail Carrie. “She came in a dream, so then I began studying her,” said Sloan. To devise the temperance leader and her acolytes’ chants and pamphlet material she located old temperance songs, and modified the words slightly, and also used certain procedures to indoctrinate Carrie’s acolytes. “Once they signed on, I interacted with them as Carrie, set up her email, and spoke through her.”
Research for Funeral for the Living was no less exhaustive. Sloan studied death rituals, and researched eulogies and “home” wakes. She interviewed the director of the funeral museum several times to learn about death practices and rituals. “It is one of several ritual projects I utilize in my art practice as an ongoing exercise to explore healing and death rituals. The audience participates in actions encouraging realizations of the brevity of life and aiding in connecting to the present,” Sloan published as an artist statement for the funeral party.
Emily Sloan, Funeral for the Living, 2011, Performance image courtesy of 14 Pews.
Sloan performed Funeral for the Living, “the living wake,” she calls it, on the first day of January 2011 at 14 Pews. The solemn event included a casket, a brass band, booze, pot luck casseroles, and a funeral pyre in the back yard, “so participants could say good-bye to addictions, jobs, bras, lovers, and hemorrhoids, other things,” said Sloan who presided over the service and delivered a “eulogy for art.” “Eulogy Writing Deaconesses” helped participants write their own eulogies if they desired, and read eulogies if participants desired.
VBA: Deaconesses?
ES: Deaconesses, who I blessed. The funeral was so enriching and powerful, it really blew me away. There was this man who was a meth user and he wrote an eight page eulogy saying the drug ruined his life,” said Sloan, “and he burned his drug paraphernalia. Another man with a long braid cut it off and threw it in the fire. One woman said she hadn’t had sex forever and burned her bra. Strangers came together and really bonded.”
Emily Sloan, Funeral for the Living, 2011, Performance image courtesy of 14 Pews.
Emily Sloan, Funeral for the Living, 2011, Pulling hair to express grief dates back to antiquity. You can see it on Greek vases. Performance image courtesy of 14 Pews.
Sloan blesses and officiates, and even became ordained to perform marriages. I asked her if her talent for pious carrying on relates to her past. “Maybe I do explore my past, being brought up religious,” she said. Carrie made up her own religion around drinking. I made up mine on napping, and the funeral rituals, perhaps I’m trying to re-create something religious.”
“We need spirituality,” she told me in a separate conversation.
Emily Sloan, Funeral for the Living, 2011, Performance image courtesy of 14 Pews.
The “napture” was fast approaching so it was imperative the word be spread. Cressandra Thibodeaux of 14 Pews created a promo video to help publicize Reverend Emily’s message that salvation could be gained by way of the Southern Naptist Convention which was to take place concurrently with the real southern Baptist convention. Sloan who wore minister robes invited the unsaved to come forward and be “naptized,” to profess their belief in the benefits of napping, and their commitment to napping, and warned that the un-saved could be “trapped in insomniatic hell.” Michael Galbreth (The Art Guy) came forth to give testimony. He wants to be saved and is getting naptized, “I do want to be prepared for the napture regardless, and I think it’s better to be naptized just in case.” Furniture store clown Matress Mac in his typical motor mouth style warned of the napture, “Hi, this is Matress Mac. Don’t get left awake! Don’t get left awake!”
Emily Sloan, Southern Naptist Convention, 2011, Photo by Nick De la Torre
Southern Naptist Convention took place in 2011 at 14 Pews and again in 2012 in California. But the Universal Nap Church has been evolving ever since Sloan began “napping” performances, of which over 50 have been performed. I witnessed Napping Affects Performance at Art League in June of 2010. In a gallery made dark with covered windows there were cots with sheets and pillows available for restorative sleep. Sloan presided over the congregation. The day I attended she wore a white clinician’s coat and held a clip board, and put her finger to her lips to silence anyone disrespectful enough to disturb the napping. There were appointment cards, “Your NAP appointment is set for _____. To re-schedule or cancel an appointment – call (number).” Some brilliantly newspaper art write got all excited about the “immaculate sheets and fresh pillows.”
Emily Sloan, Southern Naptist Convention promo video, 2011
Research, Sloan said, revealed that naps and siestas were practically eliminated with the industrial revolution and the invention of the light bulb, and that humans are the only animals on a lengthy waking cycle, and it’s known that napping significantly improves performance. Prior to this she had begun establishing the Universal Nap church. Sloan researched religious congregations and recalled “my own Church of Christ experience” and that scripture says where two or more are gathered, you have a church. Sloan translated a parable about 7 trumpets into 7 blankets and began writing her own sermons based on parables.
“Southern Naptist Convention evolved out of Napping Affects Performance, and then turned into a spiritual movement. Let he who falls asleep in church cast the first pillow,” Sloan told me.
Emily Sloan, Napping Affects Performance, 2010, Art League
Sloan comes to art with heavy academic training gained through two master programs in sculpture, painting and art history. She has built an impressive portfolio of sculpture, video and performance, while tirelessly pursuing curatorial projects that highlight other artists, and continuing to teach. It’s become clear from our talks she’s extremely knowledgeable about the history of art, a rich chapter of which includes the body as an art object. Performance art, which reaches back to Dada events of 1916, began to cross barriers with sculptural use of the body once postmodernism annihilated formal art categories.
VBA: Your specialty is sculpture. Use of the artist's body as an art material, a sculptural tool, is a well established postmodern tradition, perfected by such as Beuys and Nauman. Did your knowledge of sculpture and assemblage lead you to performance?
ES: It certainly didn't hurt. Sculpture is very open-ended and not medium-specific, and the body is an amazing material/medium.Sloan’s sculptures have received critical praise from Robert Boyd here on Pan. Boyd endorsed Black and White Picket Fence and Traveling Bauhaus R shown at Box 13 in 2009, as well as the large “boudoir” lamp installation at Lawndale, and he described the wall mounted snow globes with photos exhibited in Round, Round at Redbud Gallery in 2010 as possessing “a spooky nostalgic quality.” Among other things, the critic has called Sloan’s sculptures well-crafted objects that are beautiful to look at and fascinating to think about. Her talent Boyd recently told me is the reason he considers Sloan “one of the blog’s favorite artists.”
Emily Sloan, Round, Round, 2010, installation view, Photo by Robert Boyd
Emily Sloan, Snow Globe from Round, Round, 2010, Photo by Robert Boyd
Emily Sloan, Boudoir Lamps, 2009, Installation at Lawndale Art Center
Emily Sloan, ShadeCloud, 2011, Outdoor Light Installation at Art League’s Sculpture Garden
The elegant works Sloan exhibited at Darke Gallery in her 2012 solo exhibition Enlight were inspired by mandalas that are part of Buddhist and Hindu religious traditions. Her statement included, “mandalas, concentric diagrams, are used as spiritual teaching tools and as aids to meditation and trance induction. In common use, mandala has become a generic term for any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung saw the mandala as ‘a representation of the unconscious self’, and believed his paintings of mandalas enabled him to identify emotional disorders and work towards wholeness in personality.” Such elevated mining of Jung and Hindu culture seems cohesive with Sloan’s other investigations into ritual and traditions and societal norms.
Emily Sloan, Mandala, 2012, found metal
How does Sloan’s Diboll Texas family react to her art? They are not entirely thrilled. Sloan said she began making art as a child but her family discouraged it. They viewed it as frivolous. Art was “from the devil” she remembers being told once. “I felt guilty but kept making art.” After obtaining an undergraduate degree in something practical to please them, she entered a masters program in painting and art history on a full scholarship, the point being they did not have to bear the financial burden. Although Sloan believes her art is positive, certain performances upset her family. An East Texas newspaper wrote about it when she performed Second Naptist Convention. “It humiliated my parents, and they were embarrassed to go to church,” Sloan said. She did not set out to hurt them, but “they did not talk to me for a while.”
Along with her families’ discomfort, her art has elicited negative viewer reaction. In fact, some viewers’ responses to Carrie Nation and to warnings about the napture have been down right hostile. Sloan recalled being screamed at for holding a Second Naptist Convention sign “don’t get left awake” during a Halloween “Zombie Walk.” “This is not Sunday, people yelled, as if I was protesting the Zombie walk.” She was treated like a nut case for distributing pamphlets warning of the napture when she performed Second Naptist Convention in California and found it ironic that druggies and perverts at Venice Beach were so intolerant. “People thought I was crazy, crazy. Some ran away from me.” Carrie has been treated disrespectfully. “Just for handing out pamphlets, they treat her like shit, I witnessed people’s other side, their true colors. What if my pamphlet called for gay rights? When I do not speak, they do not know what’s in a pamphlet.”
The most extreme hostility has come from other artists. “During a performance at Diverse Works some peopled screamed 'Fuck You' at my followers. We were simply handing out pamphlets,” Sloan said. She finds the art crowd’s intolerance extremely ironic. “Some performances might have a whole bunch of naked people, and that’s OK but when it’s Carrie she’s treated like crap. Biker gang people were polite, artists less accepting.” Scenarios such as these are precisely what she intends with the art. “It’s not just interesting that people attack, it’s important, a very significant experience,” Sloan told me.
Negativity aside, response has been tremendously positive. Sloan believes her art is enlightening to viewers. Funeral for the Living she considers a powerful tool for healing. “Many people I met for the first time at the event have contacted me to share how it affected them” which is why she is thrilled to be invited by 14 Pews “to make this journey again” on January 1.
The artist herself benefits. She felt delivered from painful memories when she performed “a group marriage” in Fit to be Tied, “I married some men, we had a cake, I got ordained, you can do it online.” Sloan was still dealing with her divorce, she explained, and the performance was like “an exorcism.” It included a ritual of burning a circle of paper inside which she stood. This becomes poignant and raw with the knowledge that she was in an abusive marriage with her life at risk from violence and isolation and awareness that her family would be terribly embarrassed by divorce.
I can’t help but think the video Sloan presented in Lawndale’s 2011 Big Show, Please Don’t Tell my Parents, came out of something painful and in need of personal healing. In it a white female (Sloan) repeatedly spanks a black man’s naked ass. What seems boneheaded and perverse, is in fact as the narrative unfolds, a denouncement of the hypocrisy of lustful, abusive authoritarian figures. It ends with an authoritarian character becoming orgasmic over physical retribution.
The performance Rotational Aesthetics at Lawndale seems dark and desperate as Sloan and another performer struggle in James Ciosek’s “Human Hamster Wheel.” Perhaps it symbolized our existential plight.
Emily Sloan, Rotational Aesthetics, 2012, Photo by Alex Barber
There can’t be a tradition more irreconcilable, more worthy of Sloan’s investigation, than the art world. It is as outrageous as any religion. Sloan goes after it in the most subtle manner. She is founding director of an exhibition space called the Kenmore. “It is not just another white cube,” her statement reads, “the Kenmore is a small, cold self-run exhibition object measuring approximately 36"x24"x24. Its mission is to keep ideas fresh through providing a unique exhibition context and the experience of collaboration.” The term white cube parodies art galleries just as the lofty language in the formal press releases she issues to announces Kenmore events mock arts’ grandeur.
When it’s not needed to cool her beer, Sloan invites other artists to exhibit in the Kenmore. In March 2012 David McClain exhibited “authentic” vintage porn of famous people. To some she offers short term “residencies” such as the one she gave to Sasha Dela who was Kenmore Artist-in-Residence in July. Sloan paid Dela a residency stipend of $100 and Dela mounted her video monitor on top of the fridge so the beer would stay cool. “People can put their art inside or on the door,” Sloan said. “It was my fridge in graduate school. I bought it from Loli Fernandez.”
Emily Sloan, The Kenmore, an exhibition object with Kenmore Artist-in-Residence Sasha Dela
A portable object, the Kenmore which usually sits at the Skydive Art Space makes guest appearances at other venues. It’s been in fancy galleries on Colquitt Street, for example, and it appeared in the Venice Beach Biennale. The Kenmore reached a pinnacle when it participated in the Pan Art Fair.
VBA: Describe the Kenmore’s participation in the Pan Art Fair.
ES: My role was as a curator/artist/creator/director….On Friday, artist David McClain and I walked around the [Texas Contemporary Art] fair gathering info for The Kenmore. This included a magazine and a scarf McClain twisted into a flower and a doggy poop bag (that was later blown up) picked up at Discovery Green on the way back to the Embassy Suites, where the Pan Art Fair was held. Also added was a piece of paper with "James Brown" written on it. Saturday, I created a piece called "Carl Andre Placed by The Gideons." It consisted of pats of butter in a square on a hotel bible. I also included a postcard of Russ Havard's meditation drawing and a piece of bologna stuck to the inside wall of The Kenmore as an homage to Emily Peacock's photos (of bologna, vienna sausage, etc.) on view in the Pan Art Fair. On Saturday, I sliced a stick of butter into pats while still in the wrapper. It served as homage to an earlier work created by Loli Fernandez of sliced butter evenly spaced on a slab which was homage to Judd. Part evolving installation, part institutional critique, part performance-based trans-media experience, part skim cheese, The Kenmore will chill out the hyper-consumerism that is endemic at other art fairs while (hopefully) encouraging patrons to part with cold hard cash at this fair. Despite being apprised of the likely activities which will occur in and around The Kenmore during the Pan Art Fair, Robert Boyd, the founder of the fair, said, "I'm fairly certain I have no idea what they will do, but fuck-it, no one else wanted the fridge."According to Sloan, her explorations are on-going. She will continue to resurrect Funeral, and the Napture, and the other artistic investigations. It was not possible in this short profile to discuss Zarvin Mindler who runs around investigating “stuff.” Look for an up-coming collaboration with Gus Kopriva. I have had the pleasure of drinking beer with Sloan out of the Kenmore, and in elegant establishments such as Rudyards. Hopefully one day I can see her dance.
Emily Sloan, Zarvin Mindler, 2011, with the Kenmore
