You Feel the Way I Feel

Solo Exhibition:

Emily Blair Quinn

August 4 - September 4, 2023

MARQUEE PROJECTS is thrilled to present You Feel the Way I Feel, our second solo exhibition of paintings by artist Emily Blair Quinn. An opening reception will be held on    Friday August 4, from 5-7pm.  

Looking back to Quinn’s last solo exhibition in 2021 at Marquee Projects, many of us will recall her paintings of disquieting, still-life domestic interiors populated with surreal female statuettes that appeared to be experiencing mysterious transformations. These theatrical dioramas, often drawn from dollhouse settings, were often both eerily unsettling and exquisitely calm.  Since that exhibit Quinn has brought her lens literally closer, becoming more focused on the faces and expressions of her purposely female and androgynous figurines. Nuance and mystery are as present as ever, but the canvases are larger and the depicted emotions are heightened and laid bare, as if the artist is showing us a spectrum of psychoanalytic extremes and a progression on the road to emotional intelligence. Allowing us into her innermost realms, Quinn’s titles often tell the story: “She Wept,” “Panic at the Disco,” “Protect Your Heart,” “Come What May.”

Ironically, this act of introspection and self-revelation (self-portraiture) is created though a multi-layered process of artifice and mediation. Quinn crafts and paints her figurines, theatrically poses and lights them, intimately photographs them, digitally edits them in Photoshop, then painstakingly paints the final enlarged images on canvas. Also ironically,  the work’s intense emotional and psychological content contrasts with a virtuosic celebration of paint and painting itself – with bold gestures reminiscent of Fauvist color approaching expressionistic abstraction, odd optical artifacts worthy of an Old Master working from a camera obscura, and the wonder and absurdity of the human hand attempting to interpret and emulate reality.