The Nemeth Art Center is thrilled to present two exhibitions:

E.V. Day Feral Park & Emma Beatrez Device of Love

E.V. Day is a New York based artist whose work explores themes of sexuality and humor while employing gravity-defying suspension techniques. By manipulating iconic imagery from popular culture, Day re-animates the recognizable into new forms that illuminate contradictions in gender roles and stretch the confines of social stereotypes. Recently awarded the prestigious Rome Prize for Visual Arts by the American Academy in Rome, Day worked for a year in the Eternal City where she continued a twenty-year practice of creating sculptures that interact with, and respond to renowned architectural spaces.

The first work in her Exploding Couture series, Bombshell, included in the 2000 Biennial of The Whitney Museum of American Art, was suspended in the lobby of The Breuer Building, and is now in the Museum’s permanent collection. Day has had numerous solo exhibitions, including the installation G-Force at The Whitney Museum at Altria in 2001, in which she suspended hundreds of thongs from the ceiling in fighter-jet formations, and a survey exhibition at the I.M. Pei-designed Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in 2004. Bride Fight, a high-tension string-up of two dueling bridal gowns, was exhibited at Lever House as part of their collection in 2006. In 2010, she exhibited Divas Ascending, a 14-sculpture installation at Lincoln Center created from costumes from the archives of the New York City Opera—an exhibition that traveled to The Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts in 2011, to The Houston Grand Opera in 2012, to The Memphis Brooks Museum in 2019, and will be exhibited at The Taubman Museum from 2021-2023.

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Emma K. Beatrez (b. 1995, MN ) is an artist based out of Minneapolis, MN and represented by Hair+Nails Gallery. They received their BFA from North Dakota State University in 2018, and an MFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2020. Beatrez co-runs Night Club gallery in St. Paul, MN.

Drawing on a range of influences including psychoanalysis, contemporary fashion, and human belief systems, my work, which encompasses sculpture, figurative and abstract painting, and installation, involves ritual, the recontextualization of materials, archive, surface, and aspects of 'the body'. My recent paintings and multimedia installations explore core psychoanalytic notions of the symbolic, and the real, and the emergence of new meanings through distortion of established iconography.