When developing a canvas, Emily Ferguson begins with ferociously compiling references, images of women who have imprinted on her memory through sartorial, cinematic, and social platforms. Drawn to faces that encapsulate complexity and emotion, she discovers a figure, removes it from a familiar context, distorts it through double exposure, and collages it into an existing archive of images until a composition emerges. While the artist has a preternatural ability for painting with precision, she invites materials that encourage a looseness in her hand. Like leaves that fall with the changing seasons—sifting and scattering across the canvas—her paintings develop an organic narrative through their gradual release of an aesthetic principle: sharp then blurred, saturated then muted, lucid then surreal. Emily Ferguson (born in 1998 in San Rafael, California) is a painter based in Los Angeles. Ferguson began her art education at Mira Costa College, where she studied Creative and Applied Arts. In 2019, she left school to pursue a more formal artistic practice, working from her studio in Los Angeles and assisting other painters as she developed her first body of work. Ferguson’s painting style is poised and elusive, dancing between the aesthetics of learned femininity and the nuances of emotional life. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group presentations in Los Angeles, New York, and abroad, including LA Woman at Phillips, Los Angeles, Horizons at Sow and Tailor, Hong Kong, and Willows Weep, her debut solo exhibition at Prince & Wooster, New York.
[excerpted from Prince & Wooster website: www.princewooster.com]
