Harkawik is pleased to present “Destroyer,” the debut solo exhibition of New York painter Emily Rose Wright. Wright was born in 1999 in Seattle, Washington, and lives and works in Brooklyn. A recent graduate of RISD, her paintings incorporate the formal and aesthetic properties of the digital glitch, even as they are composed entirely with traditional means. Working in oil on linen, Wright composes and destroys images as part of the same unified gesture, bringing to life halting and incomplete recollections, and exploring the fragile and fleeting nature of memory. If the fundamental difference between the analogue and the digital is one of pure and exact repeatability, Wright introduces a new set of considerations to this dichotomy that foreground memory and the emotional character of the image. She creates a feedback loop that begins with loss, grief, and uncertainty, and becomes increasing forlorn and enchanting with each successive cycle. Upon closer inspection, what appears to be quick or improvisational often reveals itself as carefully constructed, and vice-versa. The surfaces of her canvases evidence a relentless process of deconstruction and reconstruction, and bear the energy of a distant imprint of a picture, echoing in cavernous space, a faint echo that is nevertheless “complete.”
