Channeling the visual lexicons of 16th century Flemish tapestries, antique store kitsch, and satirical turn-of-the-century prints, Emily Harter creates visual dramas exploding with narratives of longing and desire. Casting an ensemble of unidentified reoccurring characters, figures drift across the canvas, tangled and twisted in moments of intense action or dramatic repose. Voyeuristic, comical, and hypnotizingly nostalgic, each work theatrically presents its multiple performances – a never ending Grand Opera.

Pursue What Flees borrows its title from a line Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet in which the author traces the concept of eros, or simultaneous experiences of pleasure and pain, and Sappho’s invention of the bittersweet, ultimately reflecting on the conflicting natures of love and desire. Recontextualizing centuries of art history through a contemporary queer lens, Harter’s figures become both historic and allegorical, existing beyond the boundaries of time.

In each tableaux Harter returns to the familiar trope of the hunt—dogs clad in choke collars heard chickens with flailing feathers, young men hide out with axes under a tree—swirling landscapes of brown and blue hills invoke a surreal, dreamlike quality to the images, presenting worlds subdued in calm and chaos. In returning to the hunt throughout the entirety of the series, Harter provides a framework to reimagine traditional masculinity and the cruel optimism of desire—the pain of wanting what is out of reach. Despite their stoic classicism each character seems active in their own misfortune—guns misfire, riders appear backwards upon their horses, and ropes fray at their centers. Attempts of control are thwarted as characters become tangled in their dog’s leashes and bees sting the bare flesh of arching bodies. Harter poetically layers each composition, allowing multiple narratives to commingle on the same plane—eros and pain, comedy and tragedy – offer multiple points of entry to each painted story.

Emily Harter (b. 1997, Baltimore, MD) received her Bachelor of Arts at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. Harter’s work has been exhibited nationally at venues including Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Private Practice, Austin, Texas; and Prairie Gallery, Chicago, Illinois. Her prints have been published at Hoofprint Studios in Chicago, IL and Bohemian Press at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN. She was the recipient of the 2020 MAPC Travel Grant and has been a residentartist at Lighthouse Works in Fisher’s Island, NY, Arts, Letters, and Numbers in Averill Park, NY, and after 1920 in San Diego, CA. Harter currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.