Harkawik is delighted to announce Echo Night, the debut New York solo exhibition of Emily Rose Wright, opening this Saturday from 6- 8pm at our Tribeca space. Wright began her investigations into the disintegration of the image nearly a decade ago, by feeding digitally altered drawings into a photocopier hundreds of times, until all that was left was a kind of organic mass of optically generated errata. In the intervening years, she has dedicated herself to the daily act of painting, employing the same brutal gaze, the same progressive illumination of a subject, the same autodigestion. Her newest paintings, including several that see her venturing into larger formats for the first time, foreground her talents as a sensitive and highly technical colorist, proposing a world in which ghosts are concretized into tectonic mass, and spectral forms appear not as hazy reminders of the departed, but as daily facts of life. ey are exquisite records of ever-changing surface; an echo of an echo.
In these pictures, the most crucial points of demarcation that would commonly be added to the surface of a canvas during its preparation—pencil lines that give way to underpainting—appear not as conscious tools of depiction but as slivers of hidden layers, of paintings that once were but are no more. Familiar beings emerge through the violent rending of lumpy masses, via their collision or reluctant union, and what we initially perceive as an arm, a clavicle, a foot, a wrinkled brow, often gives way to something less distinct. e lines that bound and define the body peek through the painting like a violent crimson sunset: encountered in a hairline between two boulders, an arm breaking away from a chest, or the tiny crack of light under a door.
