Carol Emmons is an internationally acclaimed artist who creates mostly site-specific installations, often in overarching series. Site-specificity (an individually tailored response to each site) can be seen in two installations she made for the Wisconsin Academy's James Watrous Gallery, both part of the Surveying Desire series. The first, The Pathology of the Heart (2000; at the old gallery space) drew on the site's origins as a medical clinic, and transformed the space to conflate the medical/physiological heart with the heart as an organ of longing and desire. Some thumbnail images of the installation may be found at Portal Wisconsin. During the inaugural series of exhibitions at the new Watrous Gallery, she made Surveying Desire XV: Overtures (2006) which visually referenced the department/bridal store history of the site, the qualities of its current architecture, and even its name. What these activities suggest is that sites provide not just context but also content, and that, following phenomenology, direct experience of place is a bearer of meaning. At the same time, elements of popular culture can be powerful indices of ways of knowing and being-in-the-world. Hence Pathology included a frieze of romance novel covers with "heart" in their titles, and Overtures relied on audio and printed personal ads. Ultimately, she sees art as a means of articulating human experience, and she strives to investigate the full breadth of that experience.
