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In the Land of Plenty, a solo exhibition by Sarah Emerson at Whitespace Gallery, presents a new series of paintings and drawings using landscape to explore the delicate struggle between collapse and perseverance in everyday life. “I combine found imagery and scenes from actual landscapes to create my abstract compositions. In my work, I distort the physical laws that govern the real world because concepts like gravity, inertia, and locality do not govern our emotional perspective of the world. Although terror and tranquility never truly exist simultaneously in the physical, the two emotions certainly reside concurrently in our memories. As it is presented, painting can flatten time, space, and memory in pictures, allowing room for a reconciliation of many states of being flattened into one picture plane. I have no answers to the complex problems of today’s world, but with my work, I make a visual appeal to be empathetic and hopeful in tumultuous times, and I resist my own personal urge to look away from the chaos of the now. In the Land of Plenty refers to the abundance of possibility and purpose to do good but my pictures tell the story of a horizon in transition, continually reforming broken shapes into a new and uncertain landscape.