Sarah Emerson preps some supernatural-natural paintings for her MOCA GA show

?Pinpoints of magenta and thick swipes of deafening neon green sneak into painter Sarah Emerson’s landscapes. Why? “Because I can,” she tells CL in a recent email Q&A. Check out the entirety of the interview below.
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?How does working at GSU and Agnes Scott facilitate further growth as an artist?
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?Sarah Emerson: I really don’t teach to facilitate my own growth as an artist. I do it because I enjoy sharing with others what I’ve learned over the years. Teaching definitely helps me keep up with current issues and it keeps me open to new ideas and technical practices but I think it’s very separate from my personal practice. When I’m teaching I’m focused on my students and what they need to develop their own visual language. Teaching at GSU and Agnes Scott did introduce me to my wonderful WAP assistants, I could not have completed the work without their help in the studio.
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?You use some really vivid, almost psychedelic colors in depicting very nature-based work. Tell me about your process for developing these color palettes.
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?S.E.: I use a vivid candy-colored palette because I can — the painting is the universe and environment as I see it. Nature is often corrupted by artificial colors and toxic spills. The most vibrant colors in nature are sometimes warning us of the most poisonous creatures and plants. I have developed this palette over the years because it has an innocent sweetness to it. The prettiness of the palette gives the landscape a storybook look but it’s also unnatural and artificial.
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????How do your works specifically fit into The Unbearable Flatness of Being? Did you create new pieces for this show?
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? S.E.: In the exhibition, there are 18 individual paintings that can be combined to create one expansive landscape. The paintings are separated into four sections around the gallery. I created all 18 of these paintings specifically for this show — I have been working on them for the last 18 months. The title refers to the complexity of living day to day in a world filled with beautiful and terrible things all at the same time. It is amazing to me that a world so beautiful can also be so violent. Although, terror and tranquility never truly exist simultaneously in the physical, the two emotions certainly reside concurrently in our memories. As it is presented, painting can flatten time, space, and memory in pictures allowing room for a reconciliation of otherwise incompatible states of being. For me, this confluence of emotions is The Unbearable Flatness of Being. The landscape presented at MOCA is my attempt to visualize the sensation of this complexity. Each painting is an amalgamation of many events happening at once, flattened into one picture plane, with shifting layers of debris that distort and fracture the landscape.
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?What about living in Atlanta inspires your work?
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?S.E.: I’ve moved around a lot but now I’ve lived in Atlanta longer than anywhere else in my life. I’ve been here long enough to see the city for how it used to be and how it’s changed over the years. This experience has certainly affected my understanding of landscape and how a place can embody the past and present moment at once.
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?Why is the city an exciting place to be making art right now?
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?S.E.: Atlanta is populated with fantastic artists and arts organizations and there are many grant and collaboration opportunities for artists here. It’s challenging to be an artist in any city but there is a lot of room to create your own opportunity in Atlanta.
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?Check out the opening of Emerson’s The Unbearable Flatness of Being at MOCA Georgia Thurs., Dec. 10 from 7-9 p.m.