Giving It All That

source: camdenartscentreorg

British artist Emma Hart presents Dirty Looks, a series of new sculptural works combining ceramics, photography and video.

Emma Hart does not make art that tries to make sense of the world. Rejecting the contemplative environment of the gallery space, she makes work that captures the confusion, stress and nausea of everyday experience. For Hart, there is a divide between the overwhelming chaos of reality and the way visual culture smoothes it out. Central to her work is a determined frustration with the limits and restrictions of the lens. Through sculpture, she corrupts digital images and spatially infects videos, ‘dirtying’ the images and squeezing more life out of them.

Hart’s practice often draws on her own embarrassment. Reflecting on her experience of working in a call centre in her early twenties, Dirty Looks serves up a cacophony of noise, imagery and ceramic objects. Chipboard cupboards with lopsided drawers, agitated service industry supplies and a homemade water cooler litter the space. Discomfort manifests itself in crudely made ceramic tongues, pulling open doors, escaping from furniture. This unexpected meshing of materials results in work that is raw, detailed and fractured.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: folkestonetriennialorguk

Emma Hart is one of the UK’s most exciting up and coming artists, with a multidisciplinary practice incorporating video, sculpture, and performance. Hart’s work is marked by an anarchic aesthetic that upends and disrupts the viewing process, and captures the confusion, stress and nausea of everyday experience. Recent works combine ceramics with photography to physically corrupt and dirty images, in order to forcefully squeeze more life out of them.

Hart’s sculptures and videos expose and control emotions, the effort sometimes causes them to sweat, as they conceal and reveal their precarious inner states.

Hart was born in 1974 in London, where she continues to live. Solo exhibitions include: Dirty Looks, Camden Arts Centre (2013); M20 Death Drives, Whitstable Biennale (2012); TO DO, Matt’s Gallery, London; (2011) Word Processor, Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston (2012); and Jam at Cell Project Space, London (2011). Recent group exhibitions include: Bloody English, OHWOW Gallery, Los Angeles (2013); The World Turned Upside Down, Mead Gallery, Coventry (2013) and Night and Day, Modern Art Oxford (2010). In 2012 Hart was shortlisted for the Jerwood / Film and Video Umbrella awards. In 2013 she was awarded a Channel Four Random Acts commission (forthcoming in 2014) when shortlisted for the Film London Jarman Award.