Gallery for Ghosts

“The Emanation is a collaborative work by curator Sean F. Edgecomb, dancer Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, and painter Candice Flewharty. Originally performed in Gallery for Ghosts, an attic gallery within a seventeenth-century house in Norwichtown, Connecticut, the work asks how we might channel ghosts and what they might teach us through a multidisciplinary engagement with history, embodiment, and materiality.

Under the full moon at Gallery for Ghosts, each summer Shannon performs an improvised, butoh-inspired dance informed by her scholarly expertise in haunting and the occult. In response, Flewharty creates live, gestural drawings that register the movement as it unfolds, later transforming these encounters into evocative oil paintings. Exhibited in the gallery and elsewhere, these works become material traces of an ephemeral encounter among body, place, and memory. The performance also extends beyond Gallery for Ghosts, moving into the attics of other historic houses and creating an expanding network of sites and imagined connections among the spirits that inhabit them. Alongside Flewharty’s paintings and drawings, live video feeds from Gallery for Ghosts are projected into exhibition spaces, creating a virtual channel for potential ghostly connection. Shannon opens each exhibition through a ritual that activates the space and invites audiences into this expanding network of embodied, material, and imagined encounters.

Rather than literally representing ghosts or recovering a fixed past, The Emanation activates history through movement, contact, and material trace. The work becomes an ongoing archive grounded not in preservation, but in embodied encounters that generate new possibilities for remembering, haunting, and knowing.” - Sean F. Edgecomb, curator