ELIZA LU DOYLE & EM GALLAGHER: ARE YOU MY BROTHER
Saturday, August 31 - Sunday, September 29, 2024
The Little Gallery at Duck Creek Farm
Reception: Saturday August 31, 5-7 pm

Are You My Brother: Eliza Lu Doyle & Em Gallagher 

Without recognition, we are forever looking for our twin. Or so believes psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut. The child yearns to be understood by someone who they perceive as similar to themself. We look left and we look right, for the person who shares the same face, the same values – not at face value but in shared experience, to behold ourselves before us and ask, Are You My Brother? For Em and Eliza, this interdependence is neither on top of nor underneath, nor nearby, nor across, but rather next to, tumbling.  We are attached, laying horizontal next to our sibling, twins of the same ship. To be mirrored, to mirror, to be the mirror – is to encounter something that coheres, that em-bodies the otherwise fragmented onslaught of sensory input, of sight, of smell, of the feeling of what it is to be. To retrieve ourselves in full, To Know Thyself (is it perverse?), a lusting after the idea that we grow into the self-concept, the experience of I, as me, and not—but distinct from—the Other. 

Em and Eliza are playable characters, running and jumping, assembling the flower power-ups and fire-ball throwing visage of a modern-day Super Mario Bros brotherhood. In a competitive undercurrent, the water comes from the same source: are they descendants of Abel and Cain, Romulus and Remus, The Brothers Karamazov? In a performance of the fight for the phallus, muscling, they throw away the pretext—a craving for power, that Envy—but keep the staging, becoming instead shapes interacting, shapes encountering one another. In “queer entropy” – a term coined with eyes too open, with letters, with pictures both moving and still – they forge an inside joke: at once falling together and falling apart, as they live out the wish, the phantasy of wrestling with, swimming against, sparring with self and other at the shore’s edge. Bodies resting, failing, flailing, floating, touching, playing, in, against, acknowledging groundlessness all the while looking for a ground – or another body to push up against. 

What are they fighting for? Their artifacts attest to the mere existence of bodies in gravity, those which by definition must be pulled into contact with that which is distinctly Something Else. But in the associative abstract we must not forget the skin and breasts and spit and kissing, and water and bricks, and graphite and wood, and darkness and light, motion and its opposite, image and its negative, flection, in-flection, re-flection, the projection and imitation of fabric, of flesh, and the way materials touch each other, prompting us to wonder, what it would be like to notice ourselves noticing ourselves.  

-Kendra Terry 2024 

Situated on Historic Duck Creek Farm in the Springs hamlet of East Hampton, NY, The Arts Center at Duck Creek operates as a New York State 501(c)(3) nonprofit entity. Since 2018, we have been dedicated to showcasing diverse artistic expressions and fostering community engagement. Our programming is always free and open to all, and we are sustained solely through grant allocations and donations.