Emily Janowick: Long Walk

The Richard and Dolly Maass Gallery at SUNY SUNY Purchase is proud to present Long Walk, Emily Janowick’s first institutional solo exhibition. Janowick’s work has been marked by a consideration of location, tenderness, repetition, and the passing of time. For this exhibition, Janowick revisits stairs as a symbol.

In Long Walk, twin monumental staircases are turned in upon one another into the shape of an X. A powerful placeholder, X can indicate a crossing, a point on a map where the gold is, the mark of a name by one incapable of writing it, the meeting of two rivers. X marks the spot. In Long Walk, the treasure exists in the intersection.

The arms of the staircases reach for one another and find themselves in embrace.

Each half of the sculpture exhales a sound piece made in collaboration between Janowick and her daughter, sound artist Shiloh Blue. The first was recorded at a dead tree a 9 minute walk from the gallery, which Janowick visited daily from January through June of 2026 during her time as the University’s Windgate Artist in Residence. Along with the artists’ voices one can hear the ambient noise of the community surrounding the tree; cicadas, goldfinches, airplanes, the scrape of rock on rock. The other staircase sings a different song, a sound piece made using 12 field recordings of significant ‘bodies’ of water in the artist’s life: her shower in Queens, Rockaway beach, the dishwasher, fort tilden, the hudson river where it intersects with Canal street, Bethesda fountain, the sprinkler at Evergreen park, bathroom sink, the creek on a friend’s property, the hose, the artist’s now-passed dog Levi drinking from his bowl, and Jacob Riis beach. The sounds mix and vibrate through the dimensional lumber of the stairs, never the same twice.

With the artist’s inclusion of a zine-map, viewers are encouraged to visit the tree themselves.

Two monitors are nestled in the far corner of the gallery. The first shows an entire sunset (2 hours and 30 minutes) filmed with an iphone on the roof of the Visual Arts building while artist Daniel Bozhkov visited the school. The second is a collection of 30-second time-lapse videos of vines growing in Janowick’s garden over the summer.

The artist’s two children, Shiloh and Jaden, are former and current students of the School of Art, respectively.

The materials used in this exhibition have been in reuse in the artist’s work since 2018.