Work > A Mid Summer Soiree

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A Mid Summer Soirée presents a parade of fanciful creatures on their way to or grooving at a Summer party. Cleaver Magazine, 2015

A Mid Summer Soiree by Tanner Oksman, Marymount College,Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, Department of Communication and Media Arts.

First sort through Emily Steinberg’s A Mid Summer Soirée in quick succession. Then go back and read it slowly. This appealingly energetic set of captioned images is a storyboard of sorts. Each slide displays a beguiling creature or character, and sometimes a pair, pictured just above a crisply worded sentence encased in a neat, if bourgeois, font. We are presented with a simple trajectory: the individuals, spotlighted in medias res, are about to attend, or are attending, a party. These experiences do not clearly build on each other: “He’d been out of circulation a while.” “They argued just before arriving.” “She rooted through her closet and was dismayed.” Trying to fill in the narrative gaps is part of the pleasure of the journey, as is, on the contrary, moving past those gaps in favor of experiencing the piece’s seductive rhythm.

The artworks—some fashioned in delicate colors, some in black-and-white—are offset by clean white backgrounds. Many of the images are clearly collages, intricately inked cut-ups of crossword puzzles, newspaper articles, and cartoons. “I’m interested in the idea of chance, and what happens when you don’t control the situation,” Steinberg explained about the piece’s composition.

Viewing A Mid Summer Soirée, one is cast into a framework in which whimsy and fantasy meet a morning coffee-and-newspaper ritual. To transform daily minutiae into otherworldly events, to dive into the looking glass: therein lies the delight of this piece.