EMILY FERGUSON

In Paintings On Drawing

Opening: January 8th, 6-8 PM

January 8th - February 6th, 2025

I guess there's a clock in every room people live in, says Princess, it goes tick-tick, it's quieter than your heart beat, but it's a slow dynamite, a gradual explosion, blasting the world we lived in to burnt-out pieces... Time- who could beat it, who could defeat it ever?
                                           -Princess, Act 3, Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth

Grace Dougherty writes, “Emily Ferguson's In Paintings, On Drawings, is a meditation on the past through image, memory, and erosion. The sum of all its parts in harmony, a contemplation of the future. No singular work is grounded in the present day- they are fading away and waiting for a second chance.”

Ferguson is interested in a fetishization of the markers of time- the handcrafting of an unknown. Informed by the nostalgic, the ephemeral, the humble paper product and the freedom in self referentiality, she works heavily in the recycled images of a 1960s avant-garde German magazine. 

Exploring the aging hues of a sensualized media - through an almost Dorian Gray lens - these subjects are frozen in youth. Do we consider art direction as a timestamp? John Currin once wondered in regards to the movie “Three Amigos,” can you excuse the dated quality of a film and still find some essential value beyond the nowness of its era? As a physical constraint, the focus here “In Paintings On Drawings” is predominantly 80" x 40” canvases - half in color and half in black and white - giving everything depicted a vertical lift be it a rocket headed for outer space, or a model in profile. The cropping and mark making reek of a pulpiness meant to signal that what you witness is not reality, but an acknowledgment of filtering and fracturing. They are emotional prompts, first and foremost. 

There’s a line in Sartre’s study of Charles Baudelaire where he questions whether the writer suffers from the natural affliction that outer man is representative of the inner man, and should it not be quite the opposite. Are we an environment of our intake and aesthetic surroundings? In the same essay, Baudelaire is quoted as saying that "life has only one real attraction - the attraction of a gamble.” 

Emily Ferguson looks to embrace such risk in her New York solo. Can a copy of a copy be leveraged for novelty in its obscureness? What is the escape velocity to travel beyond literal reads for more sublime pastures?