Vertical Archipelago

Amze Emmons has built this unlikely cityscape by collaging images from newspaper clippings and his own street photography to make the strange familiar.  Acrylic, graphite, polymer-based gouache on canvas over panels were used in these pieces.  The mix of bright colors and muted hues, painterly marks, and graphic lines invite the viewer to look closer and linger on scenes they might have overlooked in the news feed or their daily commute.

A multi-disciplinary artist with a background in drawing and printmaking, Emmons leverages both painterly and graphic marks to create images that evoke a sense of magical/minimal realism inspired by architectural illustration, comic books, cartoon language, information graphics, news footage, consumer packaging, and instruction manuals.