Toronto based painter Emma White explores the intervention of humans on the natural world, and attempts to correct the imbalance we inflict.
White's paintings are rich with pigment, their oily surfaces built up wet on wet into thick textures and creamy brushstrokes. She plays with pattern and rhythm, allowing repetitive marks to punctuate the surface of each image. The close-up crops of her subjects reveal her photographic source material, with moments captured from her concrete surroundings and her natural escapes. Her paintings superimpose elements from the environment onto urban scenes, such as flowers on apartment buildings or clouds on recycling bins. Simultaneously, she displays the jarring effect of human impact on the natural world through exclamation points piercing forests and trees marked for cutting.
Her painting, Hangout, is the perfect example of her metaphor. It's chaotic gestures are mirrored in a shredded gardening bag abandoned on the ground, a by-product of our desire to inject the natural world into a cold, concrete cityscape. Emma White reveals the irony of this juxtaposition; through trying to become immersed in nature we separate ourselves further, reflected through a beautifully painted natural material in a artificial plastic bag.
