Artist Makes Play Spiritual At Never Ending Exhibit

The shape of a staircase crosses Jacob’s Ladder, but it offers only the suggestion of a structure. Which planes are the steps and which are the risers? The ghostly shapes using the staircase only confound the reading of the physical space, as they each follow the stairs according to their own rules, their own sense of gravity. Some appear to be using the opposite sides of the planks compared to other figures. The smoke rising from a candle is almost funny, as it moves up for neither the viewer nor the being holding the candle. What’s going on?

That sense of playfulness is integral to ​“Snakes and Ladders to Hell,” an exhibit of paintings by Emily Herberich now up at Never Ending Books on State Street through Nov. 3. Herberich offers a small write-up among the canvases full of swirling shapes and colors. Alongside quotes from Ram Das and Ludwig Wittgenstein is a passage from Genesis: ​“Now Jacob … dreamed and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it…. Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, ​‘Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.’ And he was afraid and said, ​‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!”

“A year ago, the biblical story of Jacob’s ladder became my point of meditation connecting earthly and ​‘heavenly’ experiences,” Herberich writes in an accompanying statement. But rather than a ladder connecting heaven and earth, Herberich thought of ​“a ladder that bridges the accepted good self and the shadow-self. Personal experience with religion has been at the core of my visions: a spirituality that has been both meaningful and destructive. I painted Jacob’s Ladder and came upon another physical manifestation of my contemplations.” That game is Snakes and Ladders, which Herberich reveals is from second-century A.D. India. ​“The game’s goal is to win by attaining salvation or nirvana by continuing up the ladders of good decisions and wise actions, avoiding the snakes of sin and vice. And what are games but incarnations of mind forms carrying collective symbols as play? What is play anyway?”

She explains that the paintings, full of beings human and not, can theoretically be hung, or read, in different orientations. ​“The chain of being goes all ways: notions of progress, increasing complexity and clarity, or directed narrative are all relative in the sense of this artistic rendering. Perhaps play is where wisdom can be found. Play is where we can find and define ourselves. As I write this, these words provide me (and I hope you) another window into experiencing the paintings.”

Herberich’s suggestion that the disorientation in her paintings can be fun and a spiritual path is valuable, even as some of the darker hues she employs reaffirms that many find disorientation unpleasant. The painting Yield offers playfulness and menace, the balance of those elements depending on whether the viewer thinks of the darkened field as relaxing or unsettling, or the bright colors swirling the air as engrossing or invasive.

Some paintings tilt more heavily into the macabre, though without ever really losing their sense of humor.

Others move in a more celebratory direction, without ever losing their darker edge.

As standalone pieces, each of Herberich’s paintings at Never Ending Books draw you in with bold uses of shape and color and give you reason to linger in the details. But the pieces come more to life in partnership and contrast with one another. The sweetness of a veiled virgin is placed in opposition to a more abstract piece that is vibrant with colors and suggestively fecund shapes. An oppressive Mother Superior painting stands in contrast to a glowing electric moth.

But if the paintings are markers in a spiritual journey Herberich has taken in the past year, they don’t suggest that she swung madly between two opposing poles, but rather that she understood light and darkness, playfulness and menace, as all part of a larger whole. The trick maybe isn’t so much to seek one and shun the other as it is to expand the frame so that both are seen as necessary elements, in orbit with one another. Or maybe it’s just not to worry about it all too much. A little like the Romantic poet and artist William Blake, Herberich takes on big metaphysical ideas, with a sincere effort to learn more, though also with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

“Snakes and Ladders to Hell” runs at Never Ending Books, 810 State St., through Nov. 3. Visit the Volume Two collective’s website for hours and more information.