To mark the close of Sarah Emerson’s exhibition, Underland, at whitespace gallery, the Atlanta artist explores the term, “representational abstraction” and what it means in terms of her work.

Sarah Emerson writes:

“The other night I was asked a question regarding abstraction as a new development in my work and I thought since I didn’t address it in detail that night I would try to do it here on the whitespace blog.  Sometime before we entered into the 21st century I heard Dave Hickey speak at Harvard and he used a phrase I have been exploring in my work ever since.  He used the term “representational abstraction”.  This quote is severely out of context and I recognize that I might have heard mostly want I wanted to hear in his speech that night but over the years I decided that because of his love for everything subversive and anti-institutional he wouldn’t much care how I used the information he gave to the room that night.  I only bring it up now because it was at that moment that I truly began to believe that painting could be reinvented exponentially on the surface and as a medium it could communicate varying concepts and complex visual relationships in spite of it’s antiquated bourgeois status.  I still believe that today but I am also interested in using the formal concepts of painting to create a narrative–abstraction just happens to leave a little room for the viewer.  I’ve always thought that the best moments in cinema are when the screen goes black and you can only hear the sound of events–your imagination does all the work and it’s usually far more detailed than showing the scene.

I can’t help it, I am seduced by the endless possibilities of color and shape in paint but I also see the act of painting as a privileged and futile endeavor, similar to the production of trophies or coveting relics housed in white, empty rooms. I am haunted by the implications of such a futile endeavor and load my work with dead animals and deteriorating landscapes filled with dislocation and peril but that’s a story for another time, if anyone should ask.   It seems that our relationships to abject concepts and actual reality is increasingly simplified to the extreme in a variety of video games and virtual shopping experiences that unapologetically profess to be better than the real thing.

I continue to paint because the act itself reminds me that my experiences are physical and as a society we have a shared visual vocabulary that can be appropriated to manifest actual moments that call into question the very nature of how we experience the physicality of our environment both literally and psychologically.  that’s it, take it how you want:)”