Emily Burns currently resides in College Town, Pennsylvania. In her newest body of work, she explores the cultural appropriation of imagery through the re-contextualizing of familiar icons, personal relics, and nostalgic scenery. Relying heavily on wallpaper and textile-esque patterns, each piece includes an element of repetition. This repetitive imagery is benign and ambiguous, visually pleasing and encroaches the boundaries of the canon of the art of painting and in particular, highbrow art world standards of recognition. Burns' approach draws heavily from digitial processes. She uses texture, color, and insinuated pixelization to bring together the capabilities of both computers and hand-rendered elements. The result is a narrative that grapples with the analog nature of painting inside the ubiquity of modern, digital technology.
Emily Burns' work has been featured in print publication such as Four Magazine and Studio Visit Magazine, as well as online media such as Beautiful Decay, Hi-Fructose, and Juxtapoz. She has attended residencies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA and Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. She is the editor of the contemporary art publication Maake Magazine. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Graphic Design at The Pennsylvania State University.
