"Human Stamps" by Walker Mimms

The young artist Emily Kraus is preoccupied with the question of whether a machine can serve the same purpose for an artist as her own unconscious.

Two Rorschach blobs as tall as men—one dark, the other a bright copper and blue—cast lassos at each other. They send out waves of black paint ripples, like motion made visible between them. Because those ripples are mechanically produced, it doesn’t seem quite right to call this work, by the young American artist Emily Kraus, a painting. A production, maybe, or a result?

Each in the other what each has to give (2026) is one of six busy and rhythmic abstractions on view in Kraus’s solo debut at Luhring Augustine. She has perfected her mechanical process: she begins by sewing two ends of a large canvas together, creating a cylinder that is then fitted tightly around the four steel struts of a cage-like apparatus, which she enters through a gangway. She paints the inner walls of the cylinder, and then pulls the edges of the canvas so that fresh fabric scrolls through the struts, and then she paints some more. As she pulls, the struts pick up the wet paint and, like rollers in printmaking, stamp repeating forms along the inner wall of the canvas, over and over, until the pigment disappears or until she applies more.

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