Exhibition Review - Blackberry at Neue Welt
Published August 22nd 2025
By Georganna Greene
“A word is elegy to what it signifies” postulates the Bay Area poet Robert Hass in Meditation at Lagunitas. This poem and its complex sea of sentiments inspired the work in Emily Lee’s solo show Blackberry currently on view at Neue Welt (Nashville, Tennessee). Lee, a multi-disciplinary artist from Austin, Texas, “reactivates the form and materiality of objects whose physicality is often overlooked in today’s flattened conditions” (Lee, Artist Statement). From a young age, Lee has understood the distinct value of nonverbal communication having grown up in a bilingual household, and this ethos manifests in her highly sensitive and materially inquisitive artworks and installations.
Upon entering the gallery, viewers encounter a large banner-like object to the left, and a bit further into the space, something appearing as a wreckage site. Responding to the room’s existing architectural landmarks such as a patinated metal ceiling and industrial concrete surfaces, Lee takes on physical, structural and site-specific considerations. The motifs in Lee’s visual lexicon allow a certain type of coding capability for Hass’ poem while rewarding careful looking and prompting a vulnerable reaching into one’s inner life.
Left : Installation view of Blackberry (2025); Right: Heaven, toned cyanotype on photo backdrop paper, coffee, chalkboard paint, chalk, steel, 2025
Lee’s spatial language moves between two formats: shapes that merge seamlessly with their surroundings, and forms that harken to someplace elsewhere. Heaven looms tall, greeting viewers as soon as they walk in. Made with photo backdrop paper printed in layers of coffee-toned cyanotype on one side—causing impressions that echo forms from across the room— and hand-drawn chalk on its verso, Heaven hangs like a giant futuristic scroll, mirroring the ceiling’s similar corrosive texture. It begins to imitate a cave painting unmoored from its cave—suspended, layered, and evidencing ambiguous origins. Across the room, skeletal lines evoke a boat frame, converging and parting to leave negative space that is nearly as activated as the constructions.
In fact, space itself becomes a material. The length between the objects recalls a line from Hass about distance: “Longing, we say, / because desire is full / of endless distances.” Brambly shadows shift subtly with the daylight from the gallery window—clarity and luminosity all subject to the hour. As one traverses the space, visual information softens the way time softens memory: a velvety fluctuation. The negative space between the steel bones of The Pleasure Boat reminds us that we are far from having a complete picture or story; we are instead grasping at fragments and filling in the holes with our imaginations, our relationships, our desires perhaps. Empty space here is not vacant but charged, holding tangible and intangible matter, like one’s home or the landscape of one’s childhood.
Top: Heaven (verso), toned cyanotype on photo backdrop paper, coffee, chalkboard paint, chalk, steel, 2025;
Bottom:: Heaven (front detail showing cyanotype print textures)
Throughout the exhibition, forms and materials harmonize to create a sensorial— rather than didactic— language. The color palette is one of inevitability: earthy blues, coppers, and browns and of course black that feel less chosen than inherited—tones produced by the slow pressures of rust, corrosion, and decomposition. These colors concede the spotlight to texture, surface, and space as some forms extend the gallery’s own walls and floor, binding artist-made structures to their environment. They bridge the pleasure boat’s construction—this anchor to a past sensation for Hass—with the present moment of contact between artist and audience. Using time as yet another tool, Lee toggles between contradictions—loose and fixed, fragile and stable, temporal and permanent. Sand, often a symbol of time and erosion, becomes the bonded filler of a helm; a black, waxy bramble recalls not berries but tangled telephone wires and cables. In the end, it matters less what these items symbolize than how they breathe beside us. Tenderly assembled, they present an elegy without clear words or pictures.
Left: Emily Lee, The Pleasure Boat (detail);
Right: Emily Lee, The Pleasure Boat, steel, clay, latex, twine, aluminum, chalk, black beans, resin bonded sand, pewter, joint compound, napkins, milk paint, streamers, bamboo, epoxy, steel pennies, magazine, wax
Lee has described her practice as one that depends on a mutual partnership between her and her materials. In Blackberry, artistic skill (note the fluency of her material methods along with her conceptual depth) displays itself alongside an aesthetic restraint. Lee does not spell anything out or illustrate the story as in a work of prose or fiction. This attitude perhaps becomes an apparatus through which viewers can better access the poetry within the experiential. It almost begs the question: are these items being made or are they making her? And what is being made of us the longer we sit with them?
Emily Lee, The Pleasure Boat, steel, clay, latex, twine, aluminum, chalk, black beans, resin bonded sand, pewter, joint compound, napkins, milk paint, streamers, bamboo, epoxy, steel pennies, magazine, wax (2025)
For me, Blackberry rattles the need for certainty, replacing it instead with a hunger for aura. The long hours and many tedious processes involved in the making of this work— collecting, sizing, pewter casting, carving, adhering, large-scale cyanotype printing, toning, attaching, resin bonding to name a few— reveal a commitment to slow and attentive labor with few or no shortcuts. This devotion serves to reopen the tangible modes of communication amidst the current climate of flatness and social distance (I have even heard the term “interest media” begin to replace social media, referring to apps like Instagram and TikTok). Blackberry does not teach, preach, or comfort— functions I often see art wanting to do—in the face of these looming conditions. Instead, it establishes something more elusive and pure than solutions or certainties.
Image: Emily Lee, The Pleasure Boat (detail featuring steel, aluminum, and magazine)
I am reminded of the game Telephone, where verbal information gets passed down a line of players who must listen and then relay the words as accurately as possible. The reward of playing Telephone does not actually lie within the literal preservation of the message, but in marveling in the hilarity, fallibility, and mystery of human communication. Similarly, I’m not worried about what gets lost in translation from Hass’ Meditation to Lee’s Blackberry to our perceptions and so on. Instead, it seems that those very terms— “worry” “lost” and “translation” —here function less as threatening indicators and more like mystical vibrations to be waded in. When we let it, art allows the attentive onlooker to trade in these and other words of uncertainty for new quests, simultaneously familiar and strange.
Image: Gallery installation view, Blackberry, Emily Lee at Neue Welt, 2025
You can view Emily Lee’s exhibition through August 31st, 2025 by scheduling a visit with Neue Welt (info@neuewelt.xyz) in Nashville, Tennessee. Neue Welt is a gallery based in the Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood of Nashville, TN, directed by Mauro Antonio Barreto. The gallery is open during Wedgewood-Houston First Saturdays 5-9 PM, (most) third Saturdays 12-2 PM, and by appointment. Contact: info@neuewelt.xyz.
About the Artist
Emily Lee (b. 1996 in Beaumont, TX) reactivates the form and materiality of objects whose physicality is often overlooked in today’s flattened conditions. Working large, at the scale of the human body and its architectures, Lee creates with the goal of evading both language and image. She works across a wide range of media because she finds it useful to approach the work’s material with the awareness of a novice. Lee believes sculpture is a social apparatus that can instill patience for discomfort and tolerance for the inconclusive in both the artist and the viewer. Emily Lee is an artist, writer, and community organizer from the Texas Gulf Coast.
Emily Lee has exhibited in Texas and New York, including the Fort Worth Modern (Fort Worth), the Visual Arts Center (Austin), Jonathan Hopson Gallery (Houston), Sweet Pass Sculpture Park (Dallas), Co-Lab Projects (Austin), and 5-50 Gallery (LIC, NY). She has spoken on panels at The Contemporary (Austin), Gutterblood on the Wall (Austin) and for undergraduate courses at The University of Texas at Austin, Texas State, and Grand Valley State University. She founded a neighborhood DIY space called All the Sudden (ATS) which has supported and platformed and supported the work of visual artists, bands/soloists, poets, freelance creative vendors, and first-time creative workshop instructors, and many others. ATS has raised cash for mutual aid work benefitting the climate and reproductive justice and itself.
You can see more of Emily Lee’s work at https://leeemily.com/ or find her on instagram @emilyelisabethlee.
About the Author
Georganna Greene (b. 1993 Nashville, TN) is an artist and educator, primarily working in painting. She earned her BFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and her MFA in Painting from Boston University in 2021. Her practice centers the linguistic and material properties of paint, the elastic nature of attention, and the dialogue between human habit and natural order. Her background in art handling at locations such as The Frist Art Museum, Cheekwood, and Cumberland Gallery informed her interest in curation and community-building. She has taught studio courses at Boston University and Tennessee State University, and recently held a full-time faculty position in Studio Foundations at Lipscomb University, where she developed a hands-on gallery internship for art and design majors.
Greene attended the Vermont Studio Center (VSC) residency in 2023 and has participated in panels and talks at Lipscomb University, COOP Gallery, Red Arrow Gallery, the Parthenon Museum Gallery, Western Kentucky University Fine Arts Center, and Tyler School of Art and Architecture (virtual). Her curatorial projects have gathered the work of local and nation-wide artists and poets, and she has shown at Red Arrow Gallery; Commonwealth Gallery at Boston University; Crosstown Arts Memphis; Centennial Art Center, Nashville; Piano Craft Gallery in Boston; and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York. She belongs to the Nashville-based Post-Nothing critique group and was recently granted a year long Arcade Arts Residency in downtown Nashville where she will continue to create and engage audiences.
Images courtesy of Georganna Greene.
Written for Number: Inc.