Emily Langenberg (she/her) (b. 1988) is an interdisciplinary artist, storyteller, and musician from Lansing, MI, currently living in Chicago. Prior to pursuing a Master of Arts from SAIC’s Art Therapy and Counseling program, Emily graduated with degrees in Studio Art and English Literature from Michigan State University, where she also competed in varsity athletics. Between her undergraduate and graduate studies, she worked for the Folklife and Cultural Heritage departments of the MSU Museum and Smithsonian, taught English in a Slovak high school, and was production manager for RCP Artist Services. Her practice is inspired by folklore, storytelling and craft, with a communal and detailed narrative approach that seeks to both honor and expand upon traditional craft practices. Her current body of work, made within the context of the MAATC program and her work with neurodivergent adolescents, reflects on her relationship to knowledge and professional transition to the therapy field.
Frame 1: Cherry, 2024, Cherry, glass, vellum, 12 in x 12 in x 48 in
The intent of this work is to offer a space within which to consider what beauty is possible without certainty, and how one might integrate a multi-positioned relationship to knowledge and navigate the balance between honoring, rejecting, pushing and choosing limits. Utilizing the metaphor of the frame, I am interested in reimagining its possibilities as something both strong and defining, and malleable and living, playing with the tension I experience in transitioning from one professional field to another, and the contradictions encountered within the therapeutic field itself.
Taking the elements of a traditional fine art frame (wood, glass, paper) as my medium and working with a variety of techniques, my work toys with accepted professional and functional limits. This approach is informed by psychoanalytic perspectives on the unconscious and Lacan’s writings on the four discourses, as well as inspired by traditional craftspersons and cultural transmissions of knowledge. In the piece Dream Jelly, a sketch made from a dream in a semi-conscious state inspired a form that deviates wildly from the kinds of frames I built for a living before coming to this program, yet is perhaps better suited to hold the crumpled ball of paper in its current state than a frame that would reduce it to two dimensions. Each frame responds to its contents uniquely, offering distinct spaces and points of interpretation.
These dream objects embody in varying degrees my relationship to knowledge, knowing, and the mystery that lies at the heart of my drive for understanding. They explore the tensions between knowledge and mystery in the therapeutic relationship, and between the professional demands of the art therapeutic field (to hold, to make space, to be individualized and yet abide by standards and utilize evidence-based techniques) and the radical injunction to be one who doesn’t know–and can never know– the depth and extent of another’s soul.