NEW YORK, NY.- The gallery is presenting a solo exhibition of new paintings by Emily Roz. It is the artist's first exhibition at the gallery. Roz's paintings feature sections of the female body that stretch across striped patterns, constellations, and pearls. A full color brochure with a new essay by New York based writer and curator Rachel Federman is available.
Within Roz's works, cropped limbs and torsos in deep acqua, violet, and magenta appear to float and weave through an imagined background. Roz begins her paintings by taking a number of photographs of herself from different vantage points and in reclined poses, which she prints, rotates, and joins together with sections of striped patterns. She transforms these studies into paintings that have a slightly disorienting effect.
Roz's thematic concerns surrounding the female subject are numerous. They include how women present their bodies in ways to be seen and the discomfort of navigating this reality, the anxiety of attaining things of value and actually having things of value, and the relationship between painter and model. By using her own body as the model in the works, Roz finds a sense of freedom in representing the female subject. She can objectify herself as much as she would like while keeping control over the manner in which she is ultimately presented.
As Federman writes in her essay for the exhibition, These images conjure the market-expanding magic that corporations have long mined from women's bodies. This twentieth-century trend has only grown in scope and intensity under the exhausting algorithmic logic of social media...In Roz's painted universe, the body is not an object pinned under the male gaze or pressed into service as a sales pitch--it is powerful, potentially transformative.
Emily Roz was born in New Haven, CT in 1972 and lives and works in New York, NY. She received a BA from Hampshire College in 1994 and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1998. Her works have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Front Room Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, and New York, NY and Auxiliary Projects, Brooklyn, NY, and in group exhibitions at Carriage Trade, Mrs. Gallery, Mulherin, Klaus Von Nichtsaggend, and Front Room Gallery, among other venues. Roz's works have been discussed in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Two Coats of Paint, New York Magazine, Time Out New York, The Brooklyn Rail, Artnet, and Artforum, among other publications.
