Pom Pom Figures | July 9 - Aug 23 | at CSA Space Vancouver Canada

Pom Pom Figures
Emily C. R. Hill

Offsite Park Performance: July 9 | 6-6:30PM

Gallery Reception: July 9 | 7-10PM

Exhibition: July 9 -Aug 23

CHEERLEADER is located at Connaught Park in Kitsilano 2390 W 10th. - Open for events only.
CSA Space is located at 5-2414 Main St. - Gallery is open bookstore hours.

“We are fooling ourselves when we agree — explicitly or not — to the system of value which establishes a hierarchy between the work of the studio and the work of the cheerleading squad. The latter can’t be so far from that songbird outside my window, singing away, hopping perches.” - Mitch Speed

The exhibition includes a text Plumage written by Mitch Speed.


CSA Space is located at 5-2414 Main St. Vancouver - Gallery is open bookstore hours.
(Ask for keys downstairs at Pulpfiction Books, 2422 Main Street)

Plumage

Everyone older than forty is a birdwatcher, babe. That’s what my sister Jo said, after the third text message I’d sent her about birds, in as many days. Apparently I’d fallen in love. It was their dazzling plumage that did it, as well as their fluttering pointless song. How cool would it be, I thought, to get dressed up like that, in turquoise and purple and cadmium feathers? Someday I’ll do it. Someday I’ll choose the acid-green boa, the yellow Kangol hat, the big floppy faux fur slippers, as I get ready to go to the library, where I work, flipping through books filled with pictures of artworks, in all their amazing colours.

Emily’s flamboyant rug paintings set this kind of fantasy flapping its wings. They have a reckless intensity. They are stains, after all: squirts and sprays and splashes of high-saturation colour – purple and pink and blue and green ink – delivered into white shag carpets. This makes them acts of creative destruction. She starts with one kind of luxury — domestic, blinding white, boring — and out of it creates a much richer one. The whole project sizzles.

I like the motif of the cheerleader’s pom-pom, as a foil for the razzle-dazzle fun of these pieces. When writing that last sentence, the word “fool” Freudian-slipped its way in, in place of “foil.” Here were the work’s semiotic layers edging into the chorus. We are fooling ourselves when we agree — explicitly or not — to the system of value which establishes a hierarchy between the work of the studio and the work of the cheerleading squad. The latter can’t be so far from that songbird outside my window, singing away, hopping perches. A common high-cultural consensus is that cheerleaders are all about foolish spectacle, their existential purpose being dopamine, and its activation in the spectator. For the proudly brainy, this makes cheerleading into this compromised ra-ra Americana non-form. Emily’s work, and its particular relationship to aesthetic enthusiasm, makes all of this available for consideration. 

An art historical mind remembers that these things are altered readymades. As Marcel Duchamp once proposed, the meaning of the creative act is, like the cheerleader’s chant, finished by the receiver, the audience. It takes form in the relationship between an artwork’s qualities, and the thoughts and feelings which it sparks in our, my, your mind. So I’m going to follow the foolish association, and suggest that a big part of the complex pleasure in these works is how they help us to feel and sync our way through the mysterious systems of value which form culture.

In an incredible essay written about the Situationist International, the music critic Greil Marcus – no enemy of plucky, dopamine-charged American rock music – recalled that for those old anti-art radicals, the really dangerous form of spectacle was not pleasure, but a deeper, more invisible transformation of life into an unending flow of consumption, transfixing in a numbing way,  having exactly nothing to do with enjoyment. 

Enjoyment is what you find in Emily’s work. You find it in big waves, and that’s no small thing. They almost seem silly, these fluffy, blotchy things. And of course they kind of are. Like pom poms. And also like cotton candy, or snow cones. So raw in their zest that you could almost miss these big questions about experience and pleasure, floating and bouncing along. 

- Mitch Speed

July 2026