Curator Statement:
Emily Sura (Connecticut, 2006) has been drawing as long as she can remember and picked up oils just as early. At her first solo exhibition Emily shows great promise with her mostly modest size paintings which are tight and focused. At the Wall in the Brick Art Store the artist shows oil paintings as well as drawings on paper inspired by what surrounds her.
Her portraits, painted from source materials but also from memory, show a disregard for the overly clean imagery of our Instagram age. Her portrait of Marilyn Monroe (4×6“) for instance, though from different source material, has a similar knack of showing the Mega Star as a human rather than the act we are accustomed to, just as Richard Avadon‘s famous photograph.
The artist has a certain affinity for the eyes of her subjects and has taken that to the next step when she paints eyes as a subject matter, and in a specifically striking, mostly monochromatic painting(8×8“), she paints an eye upside down reminding us of the process of looking at itself.
The lead image of the exhibition, a landscape painting of one of the nature lover‘s favorite spots near her home in Connecticut, Emily shows us a bucolic sunset over fields and woods, the sky though, is ominously dissected by power lines old and new, giving the local, intimate experience within nature another angle. Ms. Sura also explores the psychological aspect of the landscape, which is certainly very mature for such a young artist, by changing the realistic color scheme into something more psychedelic and charged.
-Martin Ogolter, Artist
