1980, oil on canvas panel, 8x10”, 2023 Print

Emi is a realist painter living and working around Nashville, TN. She studied Illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York before getting her MFA in painting discourse from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Emi's work was part of the Holiday Salon show at Gallerie Tangerine and is part of the permanent collection at the Brooklyn Art Library. She teaches full-time and continues researching the effects of image generators and contemporary painting. I paint intimate hyperrealistic oil paintings to identify and define borders. Tangible and symbolic borders define space, create order, establish exclusions, and solidify or threaten relationships. My work analyzes the conceptual and destabilizing nature of borders. I paint domestic artifacts, moments in time, that destabilize the illusion of representation. Occasionally, I use the same exploration of representational borders to explore the future of painting. For example, as Artificial Intelligence image generators proliferate our digital spaces, my work continues to examine symbolic borders by collaborating with AI image generators and painting the results using traditional oil painting methods. I use solvent-free traditional oil painting techniques. The haptic nature of the medium contributes to my continued exploration of boundaries. Harnessing the baggage attached to Western painting, my process includes a totemic adoration of oil paint. Inspired by seventeenth-century Dutch still life painters, the adherence to traditional techniques is another way to study the deception of boundaries.