02/03/2023
EMMA MCINTYRE
"Pearl Diver"
February 11–March 18, 2023
Opening reception: Saturday, February 11, 6–8pm
Château Shatto is delighted to announce Emma McIntyre’s exhibition, "Pearl Diver". This exhibition of new paintings will be the artist’s first in the gallery space.
Emma McIntyre’s paintings form aesthetically exploratory mental views through gestural compilation, wherein the desirous occupations of the mind and residues of memory causally interact with physical states. Unfastened from representation yet still of-the-world, McIntyre’s paintings solicit the restlessness of the eye, get stuck in the stickiness of phenomena, and tug at the paradox of stillness in painting.
Procedurally, McIntyre’s paintings can be split in two: paint materials poured on a horizontal surface and marks made on the substrate once tipped upright. What happens at each orientation is connected through a shared expression of spillage: chemical spill, affective overflow, an abundance of phenomenal substance that spills onto the surface, excess arising from relating the mind to the world, capsized interiority finding its match in medium.
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“Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and carry them to the surface.” —Hannah Arendt, The Pearl Diver, 1968
Hannah Arendt offered the metaphor of pearl diving as a way of relaying Walter Benjamin’s approach to accessing history. Pearls are the product of a defensive secretion and the diver brings their polished forms into a new and displaced present. Arendt’s metaphor sees history transmitted not as authority or tradition, but as fragmentary, discontinuous, transformed. This corresponds to McIntyre’s process, as the appearances of art-historical references present as though drawn from obscuring depths and brought to a new altitude.
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EMMA MCINTYRE
"The right to remain obscure"
Detail
2023
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