Whitehot Magazine
"The Best Art In The World"
Dustin Emory, Cleansing, 2023 oil, acrylic and pumice stone on canvas: 72x60in, Courtesy of the artist; Primary; Fredericks & Freiser; and Margot Samel
By JOSH NILAND November 20, 2024
“The flesh always is going toward deterioration; but something in man, on the other hand, keeps growing in the other sense [...] maybe as he’s falling apart, he is becoming a greater thing of beauty. ”
- Henry Miller
Dustin Emory paints only in grayscale because he wants you to know something darker is there, lurking in the shadows behind stagnate forms that have turned to stone in isolation and thus relate his past trauma to an outside world still faltered with the after-effects of similar trials. Like so many other artists whose work is born out of hardship, the paintings he made after a period of self-searching enter into the conversations surrounding contemporary art and its broader relevance at a historically opportune time. Leaning into the opprobrium, these lurid confessionals sell his emotional journey to a public desperately in need of an artist to recuperate their pain.
Dustin Emory, Days Before Remembering, 2023 oil, acrylic and pumice stone on canvas: 72x72in, Courtesy of the artist; Primary; Fredericks & Freiser; and Margot Samel
He was born in Atlanta, the son of a since incarcerated father, and took to painting seriously for the first time while recovering from a football-related injury at age 17. For him, it was a felicitous life turn, the rare kind in which the artist stands to benefit as much as the future audience and society he was then unwittingly made recluse from. By engaging his doldrums in this manner—assembling his own “way out”— his story works to show us a better spiritual path paved by art and powered by self-awakening. In between his brushstrokes, a narrative emerges contraposed with masculinity and the nakedness of our new normal.
People who hate their lives are often driven to cause harm to others (Emory, you’ll note, is exactly the same age as the local massage parlor shooter Robert Aaron Long). Those who turn their suffering into art do so as saints or else come to reflect the devotional qualities in other canonical figures, the emblems of which Emory has done away with in deference to the plight of domesticisms and a pair of white-checked boxers.
These points us toward a realization. Lying in confinement offers two essential choices: giving in to the combative urge to fight against the perpetual state of house arrest and entrapment, or an artistic voyage inwards towards making and enlightenment. In the end, the more dispositive expression emerges as the winner.
Dustin Emory, Laundry Day, 2022 oil, acrylic and pumice stone on canvas: 72x60in, Courtesy of the artist; Primary; Fredericks & Freiser; and Margot Samel
Over and again we see the same unsettled archetype of the times we inhabit. There is the stand-in for 'male loneliness,' his mind restless and his figure wrought in upheaval, for us to bear witness; the tragedy of an athletic body going to waste in a dimly lit room. (And in the backdrop of this is the unfortunate fact that suicides reached a new record high in America last year.) But this is a good story.
Dustin Emory, Longing For The Score, 2022 oil on canvas: 72x60in, Courtesy of the artist; Primary; Fredericks & Freiser; and Margot Samel
Every picture offers an insight into the heart of what’s troubling him that can in turn be related to ourselves: a keepsake of lost love, remorse, tetch, a token of his childhood days, anger, and a nascent ambition to learn and become an artist. The shower scene in Cleansing (2023) has a particularly bleak quality. The subject hides his face behind a bent elbow, visited by sadness and plagued by constant shame. More apparent is the anguished stasis at work in Laundry Day (2022). Substance abuse disorders are addressed in Longing for the score (2022). Noon (2023) displays the errantness of thoughts. And still others such as Tooth Ache (2022), Pedicure (2023), and Morning Vanity (2023) lend a sense to the obsessive rot of body consciousness that comes with too much time spent alone.
Dustin Emory, One Man Show, 2022 oil, acrylic and pumice stone on canvas:72x96in, Courtesy of the artist; Primary; Fredericks & Freiser; and Margot Samel
Each one of these gains in subtlety as we are moved further inside a socially dormant life beset by misery and longing. Most who will relate to them can do so because they necessarily had to turn to their own psychologist during the pandemic. Emory’s paintings therefore bring to mind this experience while providing space for reflection on the efficacy of that treatment—whether that be taken from his recent inclusion in a four-artist exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser, this spring’s otherwise missable Independent Art Fair, or at the Armory Show in September.
He says his aim is to provoke a sense of “being alone together” brought on by “ripping chunks of the world out and offering them to the viewer to contemplate.” You’ll next see his work in a solo exhibition between Fredericks & Freiser and Margot Samel’s Tribeca space in March. There, you’ll find that Emory is more than a self-trained artist appearing on the scene when the content and social conditions align with the moment. His development speaks to a sense of the helplessness we all feel at making our lives truly whole, resulting in art that casts spotlights on the individual journeys that can guide us brightly towards better days. WM
is currently the featured staff writer at Archinect in Los Angeles and has contributed to Hyperallergic, Artnet, Architectural Digest, the Boston Phoenix, and other outlets with a focus on artists’ narratives and the psychological underpinnings of the art-making process. He holds a BA in Philosophy from Boston University and is presently looking for publishers for his new book proposal, a work of metafiction depicting post-Covid life in New York City through the lens of thirteen new architectural projects.
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