Emily Ferguson: Willows Weep, a solo show comprising twenty-six paintings, is now on view at Prince & Wooster through June 25, 2023. This ambitious series projects Ferguson’s explorations of cinematic and editorial reference onto a wider angle—a simultaneously familiar and mysterious dreamscape of brushstrokes.
This body of work was born from Ferguson’s fixation with Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona, the story of an actress and a nurse who—during a retreat to a remote natural landscape—reflect and refract the haunting nuances that unite them. As she visited and revisited the film, Ferguson mirrored her own investigation into the feminine interior and exterior: learned, performed, experienced, and invented. The reference became her muse, a departure point that opened her imagination to the ways in which her practice flows between input, output, and projection. Willows Weep unfolds not unlike one of the final scenes in Persona: Bibi Andersson folds her profile into Liv Ullmann’s shadow—merging two sides of the same woman—as one says to the other: “I’ll never be like you. I change all the time.”
When developing a canvas, Ferguson begins with ferociously compiling references, images of women who have imprinted on her memory through sartorial, cinematic, and social platforms. Drawn to faces that encapsulate complexity and emotion, she discovers a figure, removes it from a familiar context, distorts it through double exposure, and collages it into an existing archive of images until a composition emerges. While the artist has a preternatural ability for painting with precision, she invites materials that encourage a looseness in her hand. Like leaves that fall with the changing seasons—sifting and scattering across the canvas—her paintings develop an organic narrative through their gradual release of an aesthetic principle: sharp then blurred, saturated then muted, lucid then surreal.
Willows Weep is a tribute to the 1932 song Willow Weep for Me composed by Ann Ronell—one of the few female composers of the Jazz Age. Ronell’s verses speak to a loss that is deeply felt but cannot be placed in one particular person or experience. Over the past century, this melody has been played in a variety of arrangements and performed by a litany of musical artists; though rooted in a well-known tune, no one version is exactly the same. Like jazz standards, Ferguson’s personas and scenes are mimetic, delivered through the metamorphic sieve of her fascinations and memories. In the company of her imagined cast of women, her canvases are portals into a cinematic universe all her own.
Prince & Wooster | 143 Wooster Street, New York
Now On View Through June 25, 2023
