Emily Margarit Mason:
Shadows Through a Petal
No Land | October 2018
For Emily Margarit Mason, the deserts and mountains of New Mexico have a lot in common with the beaches of Florida where she grew up. Her art, in turn, pays homage to both mountain and sky, desert and ocean — the past echoing within the present. Mason’s first solo exhibition in Santa Fe, Shadows Through a Petal features meditations on place and memory that incorporate digital photography with an overtly physical art-making process.
While her interest in photography began with her parents' old film camera, a Canon AE-1 35 mm, Mason made the switch to digital halfway through her undergraduate study at MICA. This presented a challenge for her: “It isn’t enough for me to just press a button and make a picture,” she says. “I had to find a way to use my hands.”
Mason’s practice begins by collecting raw materials she finds on treks in the surrounding landscapes of New Mexico and Colorado. She then layers these gathered materials and her own printed photographs in outdoor, set-like arrangements, which are photographed again to create a final image.
By fragmenting her images both digitally and sculpturally, Mason draws our attention to the way that photography can become a stand-in for memory and, in turn, for experience itself. Mason asks, “What happens between experience and memory — is memory real to the experience? What does it look like?”
Press
“The shapes are eerily familiar and even instantly legible, but it takes a few seconds to comprehend all that is actually present in the composition. This delay, the time it takes for the brain to piece the scene together is, I think, what instigated a satisfaction identical to finally recalling something that had been elusive, on the tip of my tongue yet just out of reach.”
-Chelsea Weathers, Southwest Contemporary
My contributions: Curatorial (with Kyle Farrell and Alex Gill), press relations with Alex Gill
Artwork: Emily Margarit Mason