Emma Beatrez :
Device of Love
May 2 – July 6, 2024.
Artist Statement
This work is rooted in a dynamic of desire to over consume while being force fed. Images flicker between personal and public open source, taking shape in a constant state of “what happens when the next five links are removed?” Like telephone, everything comes full circle in the end, altered through the degradation of transference. I’m interested in cropping, digging, blurring, redaction, cult fantasy, assimilation, voyeurism, innocence, recontextualization, memory/memory purgatory, framing, and montage.
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.
