Emily Furr
'Star Tap'
Emily Furr (B.F.A., graphic design, 2000) paints celestial visions that place cool, hard-edged objects within weightless, star-filled voids. Furr’s artwork plays with a codex of motifs, exploring their potential formations through a process of repetition. The artist’s serialized tropes take the shape of tongues laden with hallucinogenic sugar cubes, sloping conveyor belts adorned with astral points, rocket engines with acutely sharp, almost erotic edges, tubes, chains, and myriad metal hardware. Furr’s paintings can be positioned in relation to postmodern artists such as Lee Lozano (American, 1930–99) and Forrest Bess (American, 1911–77), whose depictions of archetypal shapes, colors, and quotidian objects sought to challenge prescribed notions of gender identity. In the same vein that Lozano and Bess probed at the his/her prescription of colors and objects, Furr manipulates the dichotomies of sexuality, played out in the tension between the hard and the soft, the phallic and the yonic, the solar and the lunar. As she charges her objects with a sensual, bodiless power, both forms and the void that surrounds them become anthropomorphic depictions of human relations.
Emily Furr (B.F.A., graphic design, 2000) paints celestial visions that place cool, hard-edged objects within weightless, star-filled voids. Furr’s artwork plays with a codex of motifs, exploring their potential formations through a process of repetition. The artist’s serialized tropes take the shape of tongues laden with hallucinogenic sugar cubes, sloping conveyor belts adorned with astral points, rocket engines with acutely sharp, almost erotic edges, tubes, chains, and myriad metal hardware. Furr’s paintings can be positioned in relation to postmodern artists such as Lee Lozano (American, 1930–99) and Forrest Bess (American, 1911–77), whose depictions of archetypal shapes, colors, and quotidian objects sought to challenge prescribed notions of gender identity. In the same vein that Lozano and Bess probed at the his/her prescription of colors and objects, Furr manipulates the dichotomies of sexuality, played out in the tension between the hard and the soft, the phallic and the yonic, the solar and the lunar. As she charges her objects with a sensual, bodiless power, both forms and the void that surrounds them become anthropomorphic depictions of human relations.
About the artist
Emily Furr (b. 1978, St. Louis, Missouri) graduated from SCAD in 2000 with a B.F.A. in graphic design. In 2018, she resumed her education at Hunter College, from which she received an M.F.A. Furr has presented solo exhibitions at 12.26 Gallery, Dallas; Marfa International; and Sargent’s Daughters, New York, where her latest exhibition So Tough is now on view. Her 2018 exhibition at Sargent’s Daughters, Mother Lode, was critically celebrated with reviews in major publications including Artforum, Hyperallergic, and Artnet. In 2019, she was the artist in residence of The Watermill Center.
Install Views
Credits
Emily Furr: Star Tap is curated by Ariella Wolens, former assistant curator. It is presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2021, the university’s annual program of exhibitions, lectures, and performances, held virtually Feb. 23–25 with select events in Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia.
Museum Admission
The exhibition is free for museum members and SCAD students, faculty, and staff with a valid SCAD Card. Open to the public with the cost of museum admission.
