My recent paintings depict scenes of monument and void, of relic and ruin, of crumbling façade or vast landscape. I generate these images from first-hand experience, interested in a flâneur-like encounter of structures of contemporary urbanity.

The paintings build a fictive space where crosses, detritus, road memorials, events, and architecture become manipulated, isolated, altered with oil paint. Collaged digital images, décollage, and slide projection index the moment of being there-- while painted elements and aerosol marks fictionalize, pervert the initial photograph, resulting in indistinct, mutable afterimages.

This approach examines the historical within the lived here/now; the works are as much Caspar David Friedrich as American road photography. Each painting produces a scene with a familiar but unnameable source; the contemporary appears as if rooted in a distant but nostalgic history. Resulting, the works strive to create something of grandeur—extraordinary, romantic, in contrast to their ruinous, desolate original source.

Recalling an experience in paint then becomes an act of re-creation, of resurrection, and a persistent revival of lost narrative. The image becomes a placeholder for a changing landscape, and the paintings serve as souvenirs to mortality, nature, nostalgia.

-Emily Davidson