My Dog The Used Car Salesman
Monster Female
Monster Male
Renaissance
The Apartment
The Medical Receptionist
The Rudolphian
Urbanites
For years Emile Ferris has been showing visual art in many locations throughout Chicago, as well as receiving critical attention for performances in venues across the city. Presently she is contributor to the second in a series of upcoming fiction anthologies. She is also completing a work that employs poetry, drawing, painting, video and animation in order to explore the interconnected plight of human, non-human and super-human beings.
On Creatures
The first creatures of my infancy were the derelict pelts and the half-finished fur coats that littered the family business, Ferris Furs. By the time I was born, the fur salon on 71st and Stony Island had been boarded up for a decade. The shop, which had closed after the sudden death of my grandfather, was prison to dozens of dusty one-armed furs that lazed about as depressed as neglected zoo beasts. Despite my present-day opposition to the fur trade, the sensation of skimming my palm across the cool silken surface of a fur, still evokes for me the dark, somewhat deranged and utterly sensual mystery of childhood.
The next beasts of my youth were those of Northern New Mexico, where my parents moved when I was three. The wooden and feathered Kachina dolls, the Penitente skeletons and especially the life-sized saints displayed in the impoverished little mountain sanctuaries, prowled my dreams.
Formed of Woolworth manikin parts, the saints wore sequined prom dresses; their perfectly coiffed wigs were bequeathed them by the abuelas who slept in the hard ground of the church cemetery. The faces of the New Mexico saints were as devoutly and yet as luridly painted as the faces of Chicano beauticians.
Behind their garish, forgiving heads, the saints wore dented bicycle-wheel halos which radiated the kind of rugged holiness only attained on unpaved mountain roads. When I was six years of age, my parents brought me back to live in the Uptown Chicago of the 1960's. I was deeply affected by the struggles for gender and racial equality, as well as the protests to end the VietNam War.
The war was central to my early experience. I recall both the dehumanization of the VietNamese people as well as the way our country, out of guilt, shamed its returning soldiers, ultimately recasting them as monsters.
All images ©Emile Ferris 2006