Sarah Emerson
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.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sarah Emerson is an artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. Her paintings and installations present viewers with highly stylized versions of nature that combine geometric patterns and mythic archetypes to examine contemporary landscape. Emerson graduated from the Atlanta College of Art in 1998 and she completed her Masters Degree at Goldsmiths College, London in 2000. She has exhibited her work in galleries throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, including White Columns, New York, Cosmic Gallery (Cargnel Bugada), Paris, the Musee de la Civilisation, Quebec, Canada, Mirus Gallery, San Francisco, Ca., the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Fl. and the High Museum in Atlanta, GA. Her work has been published in Noplaceness: Art in a Post Urban Landscape, Stickers Deluxe: From Punk Rock to Contemporary Art, and New American Paintings in 2012, 2007, and 2003. In 2014 she was awarded the 2015 MOCA GA Working Artist Project Grant selected by Siri Engberg, Senior Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Emerson was the 2014/15 Kirk Visiting Artist Fellow at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA. She recently completed two public mural commissions for the city of Wilson, North Carolina and for the Mayors Office of Cultural Affairs in Atlanta, GA. She currently teaches at Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA.