Emeline Agnew

Emeline Agnew is a painter of still lifes, many of which are populated by human forms. She lives within the amniotic swell of her apartment, surrounded by unsightly bric-a-brac and congregations of errant hair. The acoustics produce a mild, nearly imperceptible echo, as though she is far away from herself. The feng shui is bad, treacherous even. Whenever she attempts to remedy this, great plumes of dust are conjured from seemingly nowhere, causing spiritual malaise and flu-like symptoms. The building is new; it isn’t haunted by anything yet. Through the window is the Pacific Northwest and, past that, other places.
Agnew received her BFA from Western Washington University, where she drew from the semiotic and aesthetic properties of 80s horror films, Pre-Raphaelite corpse paintings, and suburban family portraits. By embracing the eerie stasis of these sources, she discovered the fertile ground of the still life, where a figure can be safely ushered without disrupting the genre’s parameters.


Artist Statement

In the feverish imaginings of the Victorian gentry, hair was symbolic of both life and death, at once embodying youth and its subsequent demise. While it often signified erotic beauty, it just as readily promised mortal entrapment, whether by the netted mane of the succubus or her earthly counterparts. Thus, its image existed at the intersection between sentimentality and foreboding, fear and desire, internal and external. Even in its physicality, hair’s nonperishable, unwavering lifespan renders it undead, a constant reminder of an inevitability it seems to defy.

In my paintings, hair is among a larger inventory of mundane objects. Combining and detaching, these articles vie for dominance, personified by their ambiguity and hybridity. Performing an inverse feat, the figures are dragged down to the level of objecthood, their quotidian accessories sinking them like cement shoes. Even so, they loom monstrously as masters of their domain, so long as their domain is the tenuously negotiated middleground.


https://www.instagram.com/emelineagnew/