May 2-7, 2020
Emmy Bright
I Think We’re Alone Now
2020
dimensions variable
video/installation/performance
STATEMENT:
I make drawings, prints, writings and performances which navigate relationships, ideas and states of feeling. How do we be there for each other? For ourselves? Where is this “there”?
I write on paper a lot, and pull from my various notebooks. I read with pen in hand and consistently have 3 or more notebooks on me. It’s a habit, I think, from trying to be a proper academic. Somehow notetaking promises understanding. Whether this is a problem of orientation (being a know it all) or cognition (being super forgetful), I’m not sure.
I use handwritten text sampled and enlarged from my notebooks. Handwriting offers intimacy, and abstract forms function as stand-ins for people, groups, or ideas. In my work, abstraction is a place for psychological projection. Viewers can use my images to ask questions and find their own space (zone?) for thinking about feeling and feeling about thinking. I’m interested in affective and cognitive problems/dissonances. Print allows for repetition which mirrors how thought ruminates, repeatedly circling around an object with the intention of figuring something out. However, a thing is rarely ever fully figured, and so thought loops around again. For me, making art is a kind of frustrated philosophy practice.
I’m interested in image and language and how they work differently, at different speeds and tenors, and together triangulate new spaces for thinking and feeling. What are the qualities it takes to constitute a “thing”, an identity, or an object? And what happens when one of these slip into a place between – a this and a that, a me and a not me, a closeness and distance. These paradoxes, short circuits and gaps are all part of what is real.
Humor/Comedy is great at being wrong footed and destabilizing. It’s not inherently for good or evil. It’s all about undoing though. I use it to undo tropes of romance, great icons of art, and concrete definitions. I’m interested in things from multiple and opposing angles at the same time - Having a kind of flickering kind of reality where opposites are simultaneously true. Where tensions resolve into an uncomfortable humm. This tendency towards bothness is what gets me into trouble in real life.
I think a lot about opposites and how intimately they are related. I think about the self and other, the good and bad, not me and me, the smart and stupid, man and woman, homo and no homo, the happy and sad, and how there are all of these relationships and tensions between them. Good sense would have us accept these opposing categories and be done, but I make things which have feet on both sides of the issue. I’m looking for something more complex, gnarly and real.
BIO:
Emmy Bright is an artist working with drawing, writing, print and performance. She uses art history, psychology, comedy and philosophy to investigate the problems of connection and the problems of boundaries. She earned a BA in Art History from University of Chicago, an M.Ed from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and an MFA in Print Media from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has recently held exhibitions at the Visual Art Center in Richmond, VA, the Distillery Gallery in Boston, MA, and at Ditch Projects in Portland, OR. She has held fellowships and residencies at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Penland School of Crafts, Vermont Studio Center, OxBow School of Art, Alfred University, and at University of Hawaii at Manoa Valley. She is currently an Artist in Residence and co-head of the Print Media Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. She lives in Detroit where she is represented by David Klein Gallery.