Lily Morris on Dustin Emory
Dustin Emory, Words Unfound, 2025, Oil, acrylic, gouache, pumice stone on canvas, 84 x 48 inches
On a day trip to Chelsea, I push open the heavy glass doors of Fredericks & Freiser as a show is being installed and stumble into a private gyroscopic chamber of time traveling existential angst. Dustin Emory’s paintings hang like vibrating portals on the walls, larger than life, spinning shadowy inner worlds. Each work is a puzzle of pathos linked by desaturated spaces, a haunting young male figure, brilliant morning light, internal motion, and deeply anchored spatial stabilization.
Emory, 26 years old from Atlanta GA, has been able to generate two solo shows opening simultaneously in NYC at Fredericks & Freiser and Margot Samel Gallery. Although only the Freiser exhibition was open at the time of my visit, I left longing to see the adjacent show and was astonished by Emory’s creative ambition.
Taking in “Mourning Sun,” I notice that the figure in each of these paintings is alone. He feels like an alien learning to inhabit his body convincingly. The works are a glimpse into private spaces. They usher the viewer into extreme voyeuristic vantage points. We observe the figure reading, bathing, sleeping, and bolting awake at a hair-smelling distance. In the piece “Shadowed Skin” (72x48 inches), the fractured torso of a young man seems to be reflected in a bathroom mirror layered with the hollow ghost image of the back of his body and fully realized head. The painting is anchored by a modern church-like circular window or shower drain and feels like a tunnel of self-confrontation.
Walking from painting to painting, I have flashbacks to visiting my own childhood home before a holiday, 20 years old, unmoored from work and suddenly able to take a 40 minute shower and actually LOOK at my own face in the mirror. Greeting the bodily topography of my home with an unsettled adult version of myself, having practically licked every surface over the decades, I finally start to take stock of the daily cruelties and astonishments that have transformed me. Throughout the paintings, the poses of the figure read like the sad playful impulses of a child left alone for too long. Or like someone being slowly overcome by hallucinogens.
The black and white color scheme reads like an experimental film. Set within milky greys and electrified by deep eternal blacks, the central male figure looks like the chiseled star of American Psycho. The paintings are flat, even illustrative at times, but all of them culminate in this light-strewn young man painted distinctively with the use of ground up pumice stone. This sandy material addition is only used in the male form and creates a surface that vibrates like velvety TV static, dematerializing and buzzing back together as the figure contorts between the doldrums of daily tasks and self examination. Simultaneously disintegrating and somehow more real than the rest of the image, the figure seems to emerge holographically from the surface like a lost energetic god in a desert of hermetically sealed domesticity.
These paintings are framed like highly designed film scenes embedded with important objects and narrative clues. In “Weight” (60x84 inches), a bag of (Cezanne’s) oranges hangs like an anvil from the man’s hand while he lays unconscious across the dining room table. The historic weight of painting pulling at a young man's identity, the container ripping against the symbolic weight of the past.
Both exhibitions are full of sadness, marooned alienation, and the low seismic roar of hope and boredom. I can see potential influences from painters Edward Hopper, Neo Rauch, Jordan Kasey and even flickers of Darren Aronofsky’s film PI with the main character’s violently seeking internal dialogue. The press release by Emily Small for Freisers’ exhibition describes Emory’s father as incarcerated and his brother in the throes of addiction. She cites film noir and Pieta religious iconography as two influences on the work.
The exhibition feels agitated and searching, filled to the brink with urgency and silent screams on canvas. As a viewer, I felt that I was witnessing a turning point of self actualization imbued by some magic order. But it could also simply be a glimpse into the absurd magic of every coming of age story, as the self peels away from what is known and enters into the terrifying labyrinthian immensity of adult life.
Lily Morris, Pennant Flags, 2025, Acrylic on raw linen, 60 x 77 inches
Lily Morris is a painter who lives and works in New York’s Hudson Valley. @lilyjmorris
