Emily Harter is an interdisciplinary artist based in San Francisco, CA. Influenced by convergent backgrounds in painting, printmaking, and art history, her work depicts worlds populated by hedonistic shape-shifters and ruled by cartoon logic. Drawing from, and at times directly quoting, a wide array of references, including antique-mall kitsch, 16th century European tapestries, the satirical prints of Hogarth and Daumier, and Golden Age animation, she aims to interrogate identity, obligation, and that ol’ horizon of desire. In other words:
In the Grand Drama everyone has their role ( ...pilgrims plodding along the old dirt road… ) by which we are defined to ourselves, and so also in relation to each other. Inhabiting a name like a costume and taking up arms, performing a series of actions to be borne out how they have always been.
But the energy lies in the distance! The bolt arcing between two poles opposed. That fundamental incompatibility of what we are and what we are called. A violence of desire, to hint at, to tilt the impact, to move towards that ever-shifting horizon. To say nothing of what is caught in the crosshairs. The little man hunts the duck and the rabbit, and the pheasant mounted on the wall can no longer remember when, or why, it was shot. The dogs ruffle round in the brush, the spotlight glints off of their studded collars. I think I’m headed in the right direction only to find I’ve been riding the horse backwards all along.
Harter’s work has been shown throughout the United States, including Ochi Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, Cleaner Gallery in Chicago, IL, Bread and Salt in San Diego, CA, and Private Practice in Austin, TX, and is in private collections nationally and internationally. She has published prints with Hoofprint Studios in Chicago, IL and Bohemian Press at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN. She was the recipient of the 2020 MAPC Travel Grant and has been a resident artist at Lighthouse Works in Fisher’s Island, NY, Arts, Letters, and Numbers in Averill Park, NY, and After 1920 in San Diego, CA. She is a co-founder of Pigeon Hole Press in Chicago, IL, which produces and publishes fine art intaglio prints. Currently Harter is pursuing an MFA in Art Practice at Stanford University.
CONTACT
@witchnipple on instagram
contact at eeharter@gmail.com