“It is amazing to me
that a world so beautiful can also be so violent.”
Sarah Emerson
Sarah Emerson
The
American artist Sarah Emerson paints
imaginative landscapes in a colorful pop art, almost paint by numbers style, that
camouflage a dark underside for presentation on gallery walls and as street murals.
As she
told Creative
Loafing’s Henry Samuels “I'm inspired by actual landscapes and how they are affected by time and
human intervention… In the imagery I usually mix a little darkness with the
beautiful because that is the nature of the life I am familiar with. But aside
from the picture, I want the viewer to feel like they own my work both
psychologically and physically. I use a lot of familiar archetypes as a visual
alphabet and I see my paintings as odes to a continuous circle of paradise lost
and found.”
After a
nomadic childhood the 24-year-old Emerson graduated from the Atlanta Collage of
Art and two years later left London’s Goldsmiths College with her Master of Fine
Arts.
Her
highly stylized landscapes that combine geometric patterns and mythic
archetypes incorporate themes ranging
from battlefields, war propaganda, literature, and idyllic gardens.
As she states in her artist’s
statement for her current exhibition The
Unbearable Flatness of Being “The paintings depict a make believe world dominated by
terror management theory and symbolic totems that represent our collective
desire to be optimistic and innocent in tumultuous times. Each painting is
an amalgamation of events happening at once, flattened into one picture plane,
with shifting layers of debris that distort and fracture the horizon. Like a
cartoon cel there is repetition in the structure of the paintings and repeating
symbols that can serve as common landmarks from section to section. In my
paintings no event happens separately, it is perpetual wreckage piling up in
one place.”
The Unbearable Flatness of
Being is on show at
Atlanta’s Museum of Contemporary Art of
Georgia until the 6th
of February.
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