Great article in The Santa Fe New Mexican’s weekly arts magazine, Pasatiempo, on Whitehorse’s current solo exhibition, Sanctum, on view through January.
By Michael Abatemarco
Emmi Whitehorse creates paintings you can inhabit. Consider one recent work in which marks and scrawls that resemble organic forms of nature float in atmospheric but nonspecific space, where linear elements such as circles, half-circles, ovals, arcs, and squiggles intermingle with shapes that look like masses of blossoming baby’s breath. Some shapes, painted in shades of blood red, look like petals that have been separated from their flowers. All of these shapes float free in a color field of cream and yellow ochre. Your eye moves in and out. You want to peer behind one form to see what more is there to discover. And you sense that it’s entirely possible to do so. Is the feeling of three-dimensional space merely an illusion?