Emily LaCour
Artist | Website
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ARTIST STATEMENT I look for images that cross categories, such as figure forms or vacant interiors that read as dense landscapes. I seek action in paint as tension filled expressions of place. I look for surfaces that hold the traces of presence revealed as an absence. The reflective exchange of these boundaries allows for the familiar to become unfamiliar. I currently move through the landscape and appropriated antebellum period museums in South Louisiana and am confronted by their autonomy and the way they are represented and performed. The site is a compression of layers, reconciled and upended simultaneously and in my work I approach images in the same way. They withhold and reveal so I seek representation that functions as body, not necessarily as information. The narrative of place is most evident in beds and the surfaces of sugar cane fields where I as a voyeur in these spaces, witness the landscape and am witnessed back. In the tradition of a history painter I work with what is visually and perceptually present but rather than a direct portrait of the landscape, I look for nuances that withhold and reveal the complexities of witnessing. Through spaces like “bedscapes”, I explore the complications of intimacy, especially with a landscape so beautiful and palpably affected by its own history. Emily LaCour was born in New Orleans in 1990. She received her BFA in painting and drawing from Louisiana State University then continued her studies as a fellow of the Meadows School of Art at Southern Methodist University where she was awarded her MFA in 2014. She returned to Louisiana and is currently teaching painting and drawing at LSU and preparing for shows while taking many intermittent porch breaks. |
