‘Star Tap’ turns it on
“We’re definitely taking the full dose,” says Emily Furr (B.F.A., graphic design, 2000). She’s referring, of course, to taking in the “Acid Tongue” series featured in her solo exhibition Star Tap, at SCAD Museum of Art.
Each “Acid Tongue” depicts a ruddy appendage emerging from a suggestive void, on the verge of gobbling up a psychoactive substance. The seven gouaches, collaged onto tawdry advertisements torn from the back pages of old magazines, are as deranging as the dreaded lysergic itself. One senses that Furr, standing beside her work in the SCAD Alumni Gallery, her face half-hidden behind a precautionary mask, is smiling.
“It’s fun to work on something outside your comfort zone,” she says of the series, which she painted in 2020 at home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. “And you can’t do oil paintings around a toddler.”
The gouaches are something of an outlier for an artist better known for her oils (which also feature prominently in Star Tap). The series’ Pop aspect demonstrates a kinship to Pauline Boty’s 1960s collage paintings, while its more explicit correlation is to British artist John Pasche’s infamous, lascivious logo for The Rolling Stones. “Acid Tongue” is not, Furr says, a direct homage, “but it’s the same sort of Mick Jagger energy, like, I’m so great, I’m going to lick you!”
Furr’s great licks of paint have been presented in solo exhibitions at 12.26 Gallery, Dallas; Marfa International; and Sargent’s Daughters, New York, where Mother Lode drew acclaim from Artforum and Artnet in 2018. In 2019, she was artist-in-residence of The Watermill Center, and in 2021, a featured artist at SCAD deFINE ART, conducted virtually. When the coast-is-clear call finally came this April, Furr traveled to Savannah to see own show.
The return prompted a trip down memory lane. “SCAD opened up a new language for me,” she says of her time as a student. “I loved the foundational classes, meeting likeminded people, exploring the city. I had so much fun living in O-House, where I made fast friends. I had a great education at SCAD, and stayed in Savannah all four years.”
After graduation, the Edwardsville, Illinois native worked as a graphic designer for major New York City agencies, while painting by herself at night. In 2018, she began pursuing her M.F.A. at Hunter College, which helped further unlock both professional connections and doors of perception.
The blockbuster oil “Thirst Trap” epitomizes Furr’s cheeky cosmology, literally plumbing outer space on the Rube Goldberg tip. “That painting shows a planet as a pinball that’s going to go through a crazy maze,” Furr observes. “Most of my work depicts industrialism coupled with nature or the cosmos to show how incongruent they are.”
An ability to combine precision with intuition is manifest. “If the paintings look controlled it’s because they begin in a digital realm. I do all my initial sketching in Photoshop. I don’t like to use the word ‘design’ [when I talk about painting] because that implies a function, but I map out a composition similar to how a designer would. Then when I’m painting, I let the painting dictate where it wants to go. I have fun.”
Star Tap is on view through Sunday, May 9, 2021.
Written by Peter Relic.
Quotes are from the writer’s interview with Emily Furr, and from curator DJ Hellerman’s virtual talk with Furr during deFINE ART 2021.
