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.