Emma Tapley

Greenbelt, Fall

2024

Emma Tapley (American, born 1967) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts and has studied at the Pratt Institute and the New York Academy of Art. She has been exhibiting her work for 25 years, and has shown extensively both nationally and internationally. Tapley’s realist paintings of the natural world often take years to complete as she gradually builds layers of carefully placed brush strokes. What results are representations tending toward abstractions of nature viewed from unusual perspectives. She disorients and challenges the viewer with her renderings of inverted reflections in water and cropped details of larger vistas. Tapley had multiple solo exhibitions with Fischbach Gallery, New York, NY, as well as solo and group shows internationally. Tapley is the recipient of the UCross residency in Wyoming, Art Shed residency in Sointula, British Columbia; Byrdcliffe Arts Colony, NY, Vermont Studio Center, Herhusid Residency in Iceland, and the Jentel Foundation residency in Wyoming. Tapley’s dizzying paintings are gleeful acts of deception and subtle commentary on the notion of farce inherent in painting. Ranging from dutiful translations of trees, skies, and flora, to impressionistic renderings of forests, they take the tenets of landscape and turn them on their head. Tapley obfuscates or eliminates horizon lines, crops out canopies and root systems, and makes porous the boundaries between foreground, midground, and background. Without these anchors, literal tethers to the terrestrial plane, Tapley’s landscapes transcend the space of reality. Tapley allows the paintings to expose themselves as paintings, peeling back the pretense of representation to show the tricks and techniques that go into recreating reality. This quality of self-awareness adds to the levity of Tapley’s paintings, permitting them to wink as they toy with the fabric of reality.