Emily Andrews
Emily Andrews is a figurative painter and collage artist who has exhibited across Ontario, Canada consistently since 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include quadruple features at Niagara Artists Centre and The Cotton Factory in Hamilton. Other notable exhibitions at galleries in Ontario include John Mann Gallery in Saint Catharines, Grimsby Public Art Center, and the Aurora Cultural Centre. Her works remain in public collections with Niagara Falls History Museum, and Niagara Falls Exchange. Emily’s works have been critically written about by Bart Gazzola in The Sound magazine and featured in publications such as Niagara Falls Review and Niagara This Week.
The works depict figures and interiors from the mid-20th century modern era from the 1940’s to the 1970’s. Although the oil paintings have a contemporary finish, the interiors and figures feel dated and retro with careful attention to nostalgia by depicting vintage furniture and dated technologies such as analog radios and vinyl record players. Emily portrays absurd scenarios such as goldfish, sharks, tigers, and even dinosaurs roaming through interiors. These animals are not depicted in a surreal fashion but rather to add an imaginative design element to the compositions.
With intense interaction, Emily’s figure engages their environments through various actions such as exiting an interior with a packed suitcase, listening to a vinyl record player while smoking a cigarette, or being reflected in a mirror while holding a mirror. These playful characters attempt to communicate with the audience as opposed to standing by simply waiting to be observed. The crisp, precise representation in Emily’s paintings offer a naturalistic realism as if assembled with reference by handmade collage. She creates theatrical presentations of everyday life being abruptly interrupted by vintage and absurd interactivity.
Oh Deer! (pictured above) remains the only collage work included with the article while the rest of the works being oil paintings. What remains striking with the collage would be the strategic depictions of red against an almost monochromatic background. The figure in vintage dress appears painted by various floating brushes and interacts with a classic modern interior with exotic pets such as trio of penguins and a pygmy hippopotamus. Emily surrounds the print with various asymmetrical white triangles gradually penetrating the filled composition creating a thoroughly contemporary display of environments in interplay with geometry.
Emily Andrews’s imaginative oil paintings and collages explore playful interactions between vintage characters and subject matter with each other through hallucinogenic implications such as floating fish swimming through a modernist interior. Her figures express subtle psychology such as the release of tension with a cigarette or relaxed composure with spreading legs or clasped hands. Emily uses strategic bright coloring of her subject matter to create a break in the compositional space, placing them off-center and pushing and pulling the eyes of the viewer against the backdrop of muted tones. With well executed planning and a clean finish, Emily Andrews expands the purposes of contemporary painting through unusual interactions and integrating vintage subject matter.
