Meridith McNeal delves into Emily Dickinson’s life and writing to create Beside Your Shimmering Doorway, an installation that creates a portrait of the poet in the western, river-facing side of the gallery. References to Dickinson’s long roots in Amherst, MA are embroidered in the white sheer curtains and the seat cushion. McNeal created Victorian-inspired wall silhouettes using period wallpaper as a background for black velvet silhouette images that are arranged in a loose chronology of the poet’s life from her childhood cradle to the bureau where she stored her poems. A replica of the white housedress that is displayed in the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA has been recreated in paper, imbedded with pressed plants referring to Dickinson’s youthful herbarium. Dickinson’s love of gardening is evoked by the paper watering can and period seed catalogues. The installation focuses on the view toward the Hudson, encouraging the visitor to muse on the vista in the same way that Dickinson would have gazed out the window from her writing table.

Meridith McNeal has created an extensive body of work which has been exhibited widely in galleries, private collections, museums and non-profit visual arts spaces throughout the United States and Japan. Keeping Room, her third solo exhibition at Figureworks in Brooklyn, is on view concurrently with this exhibition from March 30 to May 27, 2007. Her work was exhibited in Potent Sorcery, Dorsky Gallery, Long Island City, NY; She Must have Looked Lovely in that Dress (in collaboration with Laura C. Hewitt) at the Edward Hopper House Art Center, Nyack, NY; and Another Place, Another Time at H.A.C. Gallery, Kobe City, Japan. Her work can found in thousands of Ithaca Fine Art Chocolate Bars. In addition to being a prolific artist, McNeal is also a respected curator and art educator and Director of Education at Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, New York, NY. She earned her BFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY and her MFA from Vermont College, Norwich University, Montpelier, VT. More information can be found at meridith.mcneal.googlepages.com/home.