There are three guardian spirits living in the valley.

The Witch only shows up at night. Legend says the secret ceremony she performed in the altar woven of flowers is more dazzling than Dionysus’ carnival. Whenever there is a full moon, only as travelers take off their eyes worn-out by the mundane life can they see swarms of souls gushing out of a hole, enchantingly loafing about the woods. 

The Cub has the eyes of a deer, accompanied by small animals in the forest all day long. He was given birth in the middle of an open stream. Nobody knows his age as nobody has  ever seen him grown even one inch taller. Yet the forest dwellers can vaguely reminisce about that night invaded by tourists’ flashlights, where the Cub’s once lily-white skin was suddenly silvered with the texture of starlight.

As for the Dream Hunter, he never gives a damn about humans. Muttering to himself, he lays out arrays of objects in his palace as a ritual. But there are also rumors that the Dream Hunter actually lurks in the swamp area, coveting dreams of lost travelers. As they nap among the mosses, the scripts of their dreams are appropriated by the Dream Hunter and turned into oil-painted candlesticks, okras, and pebbles.

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BROWNIE Project is honored to present recent works of Emily Marie Miller, Yves Scherer, and Charlie Goering starting from November 10. Threads of the three artists’ work can be viewed as self-contained narratives while they form a mysterious tension of fantasy. Inevitable perception of reality and egos in a surreally metaphorical shape, the three tales jointly nourish the gallery space into the last haven in the Misty Mountains of the Middle-earth.

Miller's work always revolves around body awareness, as she addresses her painting as "a spiritual dance with the unconscious”. Posing her own body as a prototype, Miller abstracts and reifies female figures to varying degrees based on photographed torso distortions. Her delicate and sometimes explicit brushstroke outlines a physical latitude where conflict and softness coexist. Self-projection in multitudes, these phantom-like whimsical bodies build up a certain matriarchy with spiritual and even religious power, open to scrutiny and full of fluidity.

Scherer was early known for his practice referring to fan culture, mass media, and Hollywood spectacles in the digital age of instantaneity. His digital imaging and sculpture works explore the ambiguous sphere between reality and virtuality, the public and the private, subject of which Boy deviates from yet subtly resonates with. The boy image is isolated from a family videotape taken at Scherer’s young age, pulling the source material he works with from the external back to himself, while declared in the artist’s signature 3D romanticism. No individual can escape the experience of desire, gaze, identity, and vulnerability. After the transition from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, is there any courage or virtue left in us to rebuild a statue dedicated to innocence?

“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” (Ecclesiastes 12:8) Goering embodies his perception and transition in a year-long fluctuating life period in nonliving entities. He creates a buoyant semi-vacuum of flat colors and lines where trivial and eccentric still life portraits along with skeletons and dimming candles, typical symbols 

of vanitas from the 17th Century, suspend in juxtaposition. In these obscure scenes, the message of "memento mori" strolls around the canvas, tiptoe and wittily. As this combo echoes the inevitability of time, a healing power dreamily rises from its void.

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Welcome to the land of Witch, Cub, and Dream Hunter. When night falls, don't rush to go. Shadows will then fall in the valley below, apart from a beam of light lingering on the cheeks of the mountains far above. The air is warm. The sound of running and falling water is loud. A faint scent of flowers will illuminate the night.

Text by Xueer La