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HOW TO BEAR THE UNBEARABLE BODY

THE ARTWORK OF EMILY ORLING

with performances created in collaboration with César Alvarez

 OCT 10 - NOV 1

a map of a human experience, where sacredness is found in the everyday, and the entirety of who we are—our miracles, our struggle, our wisdom, and our mess—is held in the same breath


This exhibition presents the raw and spiritually charged work of Emily Orling, created as a devotional act of recovery and intuitive making. Orling’s large-scale figurative oil paintings—some carried and reworked across decades—are layered, sanded, gouged, and repainted, revealing ghosts of earlier images beneath the surface. Figures emerge from decades of mark-making as sacred and grotesque, intimate and archetypal, depicting babies, mothers, children, and elders in moments of care, agony, and resilience. Rich with color and texture, the canvases oscillate between the precision of Classical Realism, Expressionist distortions, and the tactile interruptions of patched holes, rhinestones, and even the marks of Orling’s children. 

Orling’s vivid ceramic sculptures: vessels, tubes, horns, and scribbled coils evoke the womb, digestion, pods, and botanical shapes—organic forms that evoke ancient craft, bodily processes, and the cyclical nature of birth, decay, and transfiguration. Painted in matte cobalt, candy reds, pinks, yellows, and putrid greens, the sculptures feel at once childlike and primordial, feminine and feral.  

The show is also punctuated by domestic furniture alongside found and handmade objects. Orling’s lifelong obsession with collecting and arranging discarded and mundane objects is a practice of amassing textures, feelings, shapes, weights, color and moods. Orling creates assemblages of paintings, sculptures, objects and furniture that exist simultaneously as a catalog of the detritus of everyday life and as altars into a world where beauty, symmetry, and care coexist with the raw facts of living in a body.

Over the course of the exhibition, Orling will collaborate with her longtime partner César Alvarez and invited artists in four performance events.





EMILY ORLING (she/her) is a visual artist, designer, poet and mother working primarily with paint, clay, fabric and performance. Emily works at the intersection of queer domesticity, motherhood, mental illness, metaphysics, and esoteric spiritual pursuit. Her work is an ongoing process of externalizing the intuitive, shaping the invisible/energetic through the visible/material, and locating the sacred in the profane. 

Emily’s writing, thinking, spiritual practice and creative labor infests, alters and seeds the work of her partner César Alvarez. They have been creating experimental and participatory music theater performances in collaboration since 2008. Emily has worked with César in varying roles as co-author, performer, designer, dramaturg, and spiritual adviser on the musicals Egg, FUTURITY, The Elementary Spacetime Show, The Universe is a Small Hat, NOISE, and The Potluck. 

Emily’s designs and creative work for theater and dance have been seen at Lincoln Center, Soho rep, Ars Nova, A.R.T., Jacob’s Pillow, Joe’s Pub, Northern Stage and New York Stage and Film. She has worked with students on productions at NYU, Princeton, Sarah Lawrence College and Dartmouth College, and she has participated in residencies at SPACE at Ryder Farm, The Hermitage, and Johnny Mercer’s Writer’s Grove.  Emily's work on the off-Broadway production of FUTURITY earned her Lortel and Drama Desk nominations for Set Design.   
EVENTS

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10
Opening Reception; 5-8pm 
Egg Broke: an Invocation; 6pm 
a collaborative performance by Emily Orling & César AlvarezFRIDAY, OCTOBER 17; 7pm
Painting Mary
a public reading of a new musical by César AlvarezFRIDAY, OCTOBER 24; 7pm 
Don’t Cry Emily
a collaborative performance by Emily Orling, Katrina Goldsaito, and César AlvarezSATURDAY, NOVEMBER 1; 7pm
Untying Knots: a Sacred Conversation
a collaborative performance by Emily Orling, Fletcher Boote, and César Alvarez

CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

César Alvarez (they/them) is a composer, lyricist, playwright, and performance maker. They create big experimental gatherings disguised as musicals in the key of inter-dimensionality, socio-political transformation, kinship and coexistence. With a background as a jazz saxophonist, band leader and sound artist, César's work inhabits a space between the worlds of theater, music, performance art and social practice. César was a 2018-20 Princeton Arts Fellow, a recipient of The Jonathan Larson Award in 2016, The Guggenheim Fellowship and the Kleban Prize in Musical Theatre for Lyrics in 2022. César teaches in the music department at Dartmouth College. http://cesaralvarez.net
Fletcher Boote is an interdisciplinary artist, vocalist, and healer whose work explores sensuality, kinship, and community through sound, performance, and ritual. With 25 years of contemplative and somatic study, she creates improvisational projects blending image, video, and healing practices. Fletcher holds an MFA in Performance Studies from University of the Arts London and a BA from Bard College. She co-founded a women’s medicine retreat and leads community sound baths and healing sessions. A seasoned performer, she has shared stages with artists like Jeffrey Lewis, DEVO, and Laurie Anderson. Fletcher is a mother and adjunct faculty at Marist University. https://www.instagram.com/fletcher_boote Katrina Goldsaito’s award-winning books and performances wade through the grief of being human to make space for presence and connection. ReachYou, her collaboration with Jonah Goldsaito, is an AR transmission from the future for the tenderness of now, which premiered at Tribeca.  Katrina is a founding member of the NY NeoFuturists and UnionDocs. She is the author of THE SOUND OF SILENCE, called  “An illustrated serenade to the art of listening to your inner voice amid the noise of modern life,” translated into 6 languages, and named a Book of the Year by NPR.  Her second book WHEN CHERRY BLOSSOMS FALL comes out next February. https://katrina.goldsaito.com/

A.P.E.'s programming is made possible in part by sustained support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and The Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts.