Lethal Amounts in Downtown LA is well known in the underground scene for being a venue which supports alternative music and outsider artists. This unconventional venue is the locale for Emma Ruth Rundle’s first solo show entitled Dowsing Voice. Rundle is originally known for her emotionally vulnerable music and has been a recording artist on the label Sargent House since 2014.

Dowsing Voice is an ambitious multimedia exhibition, combining Rundle’s visual art as well as her music. The exhibition features twenty-eight photographic prints along with multiple embroidered masks, hanging wall pieces, a video installation and a sculptural facsimile of a well, complete with murky water. Rundle’s album “Dowsing Voice” is played overhead and serves as a guttural auditory accompaniment to the exhibition.

Emma Ruth Rundle, “In the Cave of Cailleach’s Death-Birth 2,” 24 x 36 giclée print on fine art photographic paper. Courtesy of the artist.

The beginning of the show is articulated by the piece Dowsing Voice, which is self-portrait of Rundle seemingly covered in blood; the name of the exhibition and Rundle’s name is scrolled on the white gallery wall in black crayon. The photographic prints that follow offer segments of an overarching narrative of sublime femininity, greatly inspired by the ancient Celtic mythologies of Wales in the UK. Each piece is bursting with symbolism and ritual. For example, in the photograph Intro the Underpool: The Portal Spirit Rundle adorns her own body in a rudimentary costume of grass, moss and miniature farm animals to directly juxtapose feminine reproductive cycles with the pregnant hills of the Welsh countryside.

Also present in Rundle’s exhibition is the clash between goddess-dominant nature religions and conquering patriarchal religions. In Here Comes the Christians, Rundle collaged multiple images of herself as the pre-Christian goddess Brigid, who is known for her powers of healing. Brigid’s body is covered in blood and her bodily postures infer a chaotic reckoning, as a giant white cross hovers above the picture plane. The word “dowsing” alludes to both the extinguishing of something, as well as the discovery of something normally hidden from us. In this sense, Rundle’s exhibition spins a fierce retelling of a hero’s journey: the defiant power of the goddess and the age-old attempt to smite her.

Emma Ruth Rundle, “Here Come the Christians,” 24 x 36 giclée print on fine art photographic paper. Courtesy of the artist.