Emily Rose Wright

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.”

Born 1999 in Seattle and today based in Brooklyn, Emily Rose Wright earned her BFA in painting with a concentration in computation, technology, and culture from RISD in 2022, and has participated in recent shows throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Wright’s work consists of dour, largely monochromatic and hauntingly evocative vignettes. Incorporating a range of media and utilizing both printed and pliable material together in a given piece, most artworks bear a strong impression of the procedural and textural accumulation from which they are composed. Bearing readily the imprinted residue of ink on textured substrates, these works abound with entropic patterning. Wright artfully balances the inherent tendencies of her materials and her intentions, crafting moments of representational figuration that sit amongst layers of abstraction, giving the ultimately inconclusive suggestion of wholly expansive forms.