Emmy Catedral, someday formulas, 2018. Crayon on wood, glass, charcoal, acrylic, paper, Xerox printed pamphlets, and sound recording, 6 minutes, 24 seconds.
Emmy Catedral, someday formulas, 2018. Crayon on wood, glass, charcoal, acrylic, paper, Xerox printed pamphlets, and sound recording, 6 minutes, 24 seconds.
Emmy Catedral, someday formulas, 2018. Crayon on wood, glass, charcoal, acrylic, paper, Xerox printed pamphlets, and sound recording, 6 minutes, 24 seconds.
Emmy Catedral, someday formulas, 2018. Crayon on wood, glass, charcoal, acrylic, paper, Xerox printed pamphlets, and sound recording, 6 minutes, 24 seconds.
Emmy Catedral, someday formulas, 2018. Crayon on wood, glass, charcoal, acrylic, paper, Xerox printed pamphlets, and sound recording, 6 minutes, 24 seconds.
Emmy Catedral
I began with the archives of three historic but little-known innovators. Lewis Latimer patented a carbon manufacturing process for filaments that improved the efficiency of the incandescent light bulb. Chester Carlson experimented with carbon powder and incandescent light to invent xerography, and Arthur and Leslie Nash were the chemists experimenting with formulas to create the myriad glass colors and effects, and notably, the iridescent glass, for Louis Comfort Tiffany's studio. The Nashes did not patent their formulas but filled notebooks of codes for the chemical recipes.

There’s no direct relationship or even spatial condition of Queensness that can be assigned to these archives, not yet at least, though electric lighting did illuminate the Tiffany lamps at the turn of the century closely following Latimer’s patent, and three decades later, Carlson utilized a bright incandescent bulb in a process involving a zinc plate, sulfur, and lycopodium plant powder to create the first xerographic image in Astoria. Deriving my investigation out of innovations that had a connection to Queens was deliberate, however, insofar as it is a personal homage. I’m an artist raised and based in the borough, with a fondness for science. I was drawn to the chemistry involved, the experimentation in glass, behaviors of light, and the codes and languages carrying the formulas and patents that the three innovations shared. I’m working towards gleaning a play on all of these things, inventing my own alchemy that draws from the technologies, elements, and secret codes within these histories, and inserting my own narrative.
My work is of a decolonial impulse. The drive to play with, and trouble the imposed imparted knowledge of the holders of power comes from the early childhood experience of the failure of English as taught by American missionaries in Iloilo City, Philippines. My work doesn't stray too far from the comedy of learning the alphabet, and being taught that A stood for "apple" (a fruit I'd never seen, touched, or smelled). One of the thinkers inspiring me to continue to engage with science is Katherine McKittrick whose forthcoming Dear Science as she describes in an interview with Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, "is an an affectionate invitation to engage science and hold dear creative expressions of scientific knowledge. Dear Science suggests that there exists, between and across the arts and the natural sciences, a promise of intellectual collaboration and emancipatory possibility."

In recent years I’ve named and operated quasi-institutional entities to do this work, extracting some empowerment from the usage of the pronoun "we" in descriptions of activities, which does become "we" oftentimes, as collaborators and other voices contribute to each presentation. I began AASV/The Amateur Astronomers Society of Voorhees to question the institutions that govern the namings of outer space; to address the powers that name, categorize, colonize knowledge. I began presenting the ways these efforts have failed—such as in the case of the re-categorization of Pluto, or the re-structuring of our calendars, and highlighting non-Western modes of measuring time and navigating space. Since then I’ve organized events that also present other ways of perceiving space through sound, continuing the spirit of interdisciplinarity by inviting both scientists and artists (and combinations of the two) to share an audience. The Explorers Club of Enrique de Malacca is named after a slave of Magellan’s who was a person of language—a translator suspected to have been the first to circumnavigate the world. P A L/ Pilipinx American Library is a collaboration with PJ Gubatina Policarpio and is a mobile library centering the Filipino experience in printed literature, 'zines, artist's books, ephemera. They are all efforts to trouble or poke at or decenter dominant narratives.
An accretion of matter and meaning, an aggregate of histories and voices, and more than one book...the pluralization of the codex...a technology containing multiple narratives that can be distributed, that can be trafficked through space. Volumes suggest forms oriented towards circulation.
Emmy Catedral (b. 1982, Butuan City, Philippines) earned an MFA from Hunter College (2013) where she received the William Graf Travel Scholarship Award. Catedral was a fellow in The Artist's Institute (2012). Recent solo and collaborative projects and performances have been presented at Columbia University's Department of Astronomy and Wallach Art Gallery (2018); Re:Art, Brooklyn, NY (2018); La MaMa Galleria, New York, NY (2017); 205 Hudson Gallery, New York, NY (2017); Issue Project Room, Brooklyn, NY (2016); and The Segue Reading Series, New York, NY (2016); among other group exhibitions and readings. Catedral has been an artist-in-residence at North Willows (2018) and the Center For Books Arts (2014). Her collaborative community project P A L/Pilipinx American Library was in residence at Wendy's Subway (2018) and the San Francisco Asian Art Museum (2018). She has presented work as the Amateur Astronomers Society of Voorhees, The Explorers Club of Enrique de Malacca, and with the collective Y2K. She was raised in Maspeth, Queens and currently lives and works in Jackson Heights, Queens.
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