Emily Hoerdemann
Los Angeles, CA
Emily Hoerdemann is a California-based artist who explores language and color through collage, illustration, and photography.
MessageEmily Hoerdemann (b. 1985) is a California-based artist who explores language and color through collage, illustration, and photography. She received her BFA in painting and photography from Bradley University (Peoria, IL), and a Masters in Contemporary Art from Sotheby’s Institute of Art (New York, NY). Her works challenge feminist themes with humor and grace, utilizing analog collage with tangible materials to capture the sensory experience of time, nostalgia, and memory. As a result, each work is a delicate placing of aesthetics and color. Emily’s works are in numerous private collections, have been featured in the LA Times and Forbes, are included on The Frame art tv by Samsung, and have been exhibited in New York, Chicago, London, and Los Angeles.
Statement
I still remember the taste of the bar of Dial soap between my teeth as my Mom counted to ten. Tears streaming down my face as she told me ladies don’t talk like that.
Bold, colorful, and humorous, my visual vocabulary is influenced by narratives of cultural toxicity and the stereotype of traditional gender roles and objectification creating works that explore feminist themes. My practice is grounded in analog collage, using tangible material as sensory experience of time, nostalgia, and memory. Borrowing statements, quotations, and thoughts and pairing these with appropriated auction catalog artworks from a male-dominated art market. Taking inspiration from the palettes of artists, pastel sunsets, and the organized nature of a landscape, my works feel as innately organized as myself, with a sense of design and balance which is no doubt influenced by my Mother who was a graphic designer. The personal, quite literally in the text I select or the objects I use to collage, as I borrow items from my family lineage: snippets of cookbooks owned by my Great-Grandmother, embroidery thread from my Grandmother, buttons from my Mother. Inspiration from these Matriarch’s gardens as I duplicate florals in viscous black ink, contrasting the transparent vellum they are drawn on. These nostalgia-tinged works, drenched in color and dancing with semantic summersaults, are attempting to dissect the cult of domesticity, recognized habits of the home and sense of place, and ultimately the self-deception needed to accept prescribed roles*. Borrowing items such as a blatantly sexist advertisement, a particularly jarring encyclopedia entry, or a snippet of vintage pornography, which all add to the seemingly absurd depiction of a woman, these works seek to confront the traditional image of femininity with a humor and grace to upend it.
Although the bar of soap didn’t stop me from using that word, it stands out in my mind as my earliest form of rebellion. Realizing the ability to harness the power within language, and leverage the words one says to be as soft as rose petals, explosive like fireworks, or as sharp as a knives edge.
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