The Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to present Romancing the Stone, a solo exhibition by Emily Prince. Consisting of drawings, animation, and an altered photograph this body of work explores the cognitive dissonance we experience over the passage of time and our continued efforts to trace the contours of present’s absence.

Horses, clocks, rocks: Emily materializes each as subjects of our desire for ghosts, of our longing to possess our immaterial past. Each subject, observed through a different relation to time, attempts the illusory “fixing” of presence. Horses are traced again and again in the hopes of reliving a fleeting moment; a time stamp on a family photograph is magnified blurring all recognition of the lineage it seeks to capture; and pocket-sized rocks are meticulously mapped in a pursuit of mastery over the scale of geologic time. Faced with one another in the space of the gallery, they converge into an atlas of temporal instabilities marking the ways nostalgia is practically and psychologically configured.

Along one wall the layered tracing of horses, sourced from the still shots of motion pictures, animates a fading stampede. Emily’s replicated lines are delicate, almost threatening to disappear. This impulsive motion, however, is opposed by a mindful, scientific cartography of small stones. Every penciled detail seeks a symbolic command over the sublime abyss of time the stone encapsulates. With every piece on paper, itself an index to the ephemeral, Romancing the Stone insights a bafflement that makes fantastical our own human time-frame and the vanishing of all that immateriality.

Emily Prince was born in 1981 and grew up in Gold Run, California. She graduated from Stanford in 2003 with Bachelor’s Degrees in both Studio Art and Psychology and completed her MFA in Art at U. C. Berkeley in 2008. She makes process-driven non-linear maps, which manifest in mixed media installations that often incorporate time as a medium. Her work has been shown nationally at the Kent Gallery and the Eleanor Harwood Gallery and internationally at the Venice Biennale and the Saatchi Gallery where her project, American servicemen and women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, but not including the wounded, nor the Iraqis, nor the Afghans, can be seen. She currently lives and works in San Francisco.