Emma Soucek "Sky Blue Life": Los Angeles

Sunstrip-tinted, orangebrown to clear. Smog-mirrored. On the upper level of a divided road. An orange that tastes like its imitation. I am trying to stay awake on the bus, staring at the patterned upholstery until it disappears. Bonnard painted her sleeping. Do you think she was asleep the whole time? He took a sequence of photographs when sunlight flooded their bedroom. Pinholes of light scatter across the windshield. My hotel room was stuffy, but I slept well. The next night I opened the windows. I dreamt nothing. The next night I closed the windows. I dreamt mostly in words. Smoke stains on the lampshades. Red light from the crack in the door. An armchair covered in cursive with generous spacing. Livre d’equisse... Fleur... Botanique... Illustré... Faune... Symbiose... Camera obscura. Some of this is in the dream, some of it is not. Someone in the other room is playing The Blue Danube on the piano. Script floating on a glass door. Steam rising from a teacup. A dark stain on a yellow cover. The table is a blue sky. We notice the edges of things. How do we first know an edge is an edge? By passionately wanting it not to be. And the leaves are changing; the fog folds up like a Roman shade. Breath is a separate issue. I understand that the gradient is not resistance. The consonants are imposed. The lettering is illuminated. On the ferry, we are speaking into the wind. Words have edges. 

Alec Mapes-Frances 

Emma Soucek’s first show at Sebastian Gladstone presents a group of paintings made primarily withpaper pulp material created within her studio and applied to canvas over a long period of time.

This movement between solid and semi-liquid states — pulvarization and slow reconstitution — echoes throughout the compositions in this series. In Now the night begins, pattern scatters into particulates as if hit by blunt force. In Heavy metals, strands of color intertwine as if attempting to reform a flat surface. In Impact, shapes like shrapnel soften their edges as they warp back into each other.

I have the feeling that these transitive states are two-directional, as well. What has been mended returns back to the moment of impact. Something building could also be in decay. The movements proceed and reverse in suspended repetition.

Currents of blue (both soothing and disquieting shades) resemble music bars at points, setting a course for some minor action to play out. Within these transits, we’re exposed to the internal contents of daily life; the artist’s afternoons, the subdued oppositional forces they contain.

Based between New York City and the Bay Area, this is the artist’s first body of work created fully in California. Moments occurring in but not exclusive to California can be found within the paintings; the static silence inside a car while learning to drive, a radio playing the news from the other room, the view of San Pablo Bay from the side of a freeway, the wait for something long-frozen to thaw before you can reconstitute it back to life.

Akiko Neumann