Emily Harter

Instagram: @witchnipple

Website: http://www.emilyharter.com

Bio: Emily Harter is an interdisciplinary artist who makes paintings, drawings, prints, and ceramics. Influenced by convergent backgrounds in painting, printmaking and art history, her work depicts worlds populated by hedonistic shape-shifters and ruled by cartoon logic. Drawing from, and at times directly quoting, a wide array of references, including antique-mall kitsch, Flemish tapestries, the satirical prints of Hogarth and Daumier, and Golden Age animation, she aims to interrogate identity, obligation, and that ol’ horizon of desire. Harter’s work has been shown throughout the United States, including exhibitions at Ochi Gallery and Hashimoto Contemporary in Los Angeles, CA, Cleaner Gallery in Chicago, IL, and Bread and Salt in San Diego, CA, and is in private collections nationally and internationally. She has published etchings with Hoofprint Studios in Chicago, IL and Bohemian Press at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN. She was the recipient of the 2020 MAPC Travel Grant and has been a resident artist at Lighthouse Works in Fisher’s Island, NY, Arts, Letters, and Numbers in Averill Park, NY, and After 1920 in San Diego, CA. She is a co-founder of Pigeon Hole Press in Chicago, IL, which produces and publishes fine art intaglio prints. Harter is currently pursuing an MFA in Art Practice at Stanford University.

Statement: In my work I figure an experience of queerness marked by hopes, failures, and perversities. My approach to technique, subject matter, and composition is informed by material which spans from popular to highbrow, including Netherlandish genre painting, late medieval tapestries, the satirical prints of Hogarth, Daumier, and Rowlandson, 20th century animation, and thrift store kitsch. Often what interests me is the same sense of failure, absurdity, and irreverence that I aspire to in my own work– the person shitting in the background of Brueghel’s religious scenes, the wanton women and lecherous old men in Rowlandson’s prints, the surreal gags in the Merrie Melodies shorts. These sources also inform the sensibility of the humor in my work which is physical in both a slapstick and a sexual manner. In the citation and combination of multiple references in a single image, I complicate the distinctions between them in terms of cultural value, time, and place, while also creating a distinct visual language based in my own subjectivity. I’m drawn to use traditional materials because they lend a gravity to emotions and experiences which are typically not subject to reverence and attention. The charge of the image occurs between the expectations associated with historical affect and the subject matter’s attention to humor and folly.