"Emily Kraus" by Andrew Woolbright

I first encountered Emily Kraus’s work two years ago while seeing images of her exhibition at The Sunday Painter in London. In tandem with her first solo exhibition with Luhring Augustine, I was excited to sit down to ask her some questions about her current series of work and to learn more about the ways that she develops her themes. Specifically, Kraus’s work translates the urgency of our heavily mediated times into sensuous forms of material exploration and formal languages. Her paintings reverberate with a virtual resonance that understands something of our digital environments and time. Her use of an invented machine that allows her to make each painting in sequenced ways turns her body into a kind of output device. Rather than reconciling the body to a diminutive role or seeing the body as a site of extraction in relation to the machines and technology that control our lives, Kraus is using the machine as something that builds echoes and marks. 

Andrew Woolbright When I first saw your work a little over a year ago, my interpretation was that you’ve translated painting into a lexical form. You’ve developed sets or cadences of marks that make stanzas or echoes, which you build into a kind of language. But then there’s another aspect of your painting that returns painting to a kind of procedural form of image-making that nears the photographic process. The apparatus you’ve invented makes an image appear, functioning almost like a dark room. 

Emily Kraus  I grew up surrounded by photography. My father is a specialist in nineteenth-century photography, and my mother is a photographer. Half of my childhood home was a photographer’s studio. I was shown how to see through light, and form, and shape; but also, I was able to see the process, the transition between what exists in the world and how it is digested into images, and how that transitional moment can actually be witnessed. Analogue photography is a metamorphic process: you can see the image through the viewfinder and then, after developing the film, see how a negative becomes a positive print through a chemical process. 

Read full interview at bombmagazine.org