• "What can we learn about Rosalia?"
• August 30-October 7, 2022
• Elzay Gallery, S. Gilbert St in the Wilson Art Building
• Open most Mondays-Saturdays 12:00-4:00 p.m.

Emily Jay is an artist, scholar, and educator from Columbus, Ohio, and currently teaches at Ohio Northern University. She has exhibited internationally, and has been co-director at The Neon Heater Art Gallery in Findlay, Ohio since October 2016.

Utilizing both analogue and digital photographic techniques, paintings, installation, poetry, performance, and book making, her work repurposes the iconography and geometry of Italian Renaissance devotional imagery in order to root the female perspective into historical contexts.

"What can we learn about Rosalia?" reimagines the vita of Palermo’s patron saint, Rosalia, through photographs and writing in order to uncover what she can teach us today.

Rosalia is said to have lived between 1130-1170, a daughter of the noble Sinibaldo family, members of King Roger’s court. Legend says that she renounced the world at the age of fourteen, departing Palermo to first live as a hermit in inland Sicily before moving on to Monte Pellegrino, the mountain that stands watch over Palermo, where she died at the age of thirty, alone in a watery mountain grotto. The gentle trickle of water, washing her diseased body in mineral deposits, eventually enveloped Rosalia into the walls of the grotto-cave.

Her remains would rest in her cave, undisturbed, until 1624. At that time Palermo was beset by a terrible plague, brought into the city by goods on a trading ship. In a dream Geronima la Cattuta was visited by Rosalia, giving instructions on where to find her relics and what to do with them to bring about the end of the plague. It is time for me to come back, there is work to be done, Rosalia must have told the woman in the dream. And so, it was:  her remains were dug out of the earth and carried throughout the city in solemn processions. The plague appeared to dissipate.

What can we learn from Rosalia? In this endless heat and noise, the weight of what is coming, what she shares with us, what she suggests, seems as if it’s an impossibility: retreat and assimilation into the cave, emergence and fare (Italian irregular verb: to do/to make) into the city.