Emma Fineman
Region: Pacific Coast
In my practice, I explore methods to fracture and reconfigure
pictorial space as a means to describe and digest the dense
compression and spatialization of time in contemporary culture.
In our moment, we are inundated with visual information that
renders our ability to understand and process experience—as
well as our sense of time and perspective—haphazard, if not
indeed skewed. My paintings begin here and assert the idea of
looking at and through such a fractured pictorial space. I then
begin to question how figural information might exist within this
frame. My research manifests itself in a series of gestural marks
that sit somewhere between drawing and painting; between the
quick note-to-self one makes in order to jot down an idea and
the more prolonged meditation on the parts of daily life that, for
some unknowable reason, affix themselves to the back of one’s
mind and kick about with an unnerving permanence. This, a mix
of the personal and the shared, provides an experiential basis and
context for my paintings.