EMMA TAPLEY: After Life / Amongst The Trees at DFN Projects

Emma Tapley (b. 1967)

After Life / Inversion, 2024

Oil on Linen

40h x 60w in

ET026

After Life / Inversion, 2024

Installation View

Emma Tapley (b. 1967)

After Life / Inversion / Madison SQ Park II, 2024

oil on dibond

20h x 24w in

ET021

After Life / Inversion / Madison SQ Park II, 2024

Installation View

After Life / Inversion / Madison SQ Park, 2024

Installation View

Emma Tapley (b. 1967)

After Life / Inversion / Madison SQ Park, 2024

oil on dibond

20h x 24w in

SOLD

Emma Tapley (b. 1967)

Amongst The Trees III Sointula, 2023

oil on panel

8h x 10w in

SOLD

Emma Tapley (b. 1967)

After Life / Central Park, 2024

Oil on panel

36h x 48w in

ET019

After Life / Central Park, 2024

Installation View 

Amongst the Trees Installation View

Emma Tapley (b. 1967)

Amongst The Trees II / Sointula BC, 2023

Oil on panel

8h x 10w in

ET023

Emma Tapley (b. 1967)

Amongst The Trees: Sointula, 2023

Oil on panel

8h x 10w in

ET022

Emma Tapley (b. 1967)

Amongst The Trees Sag Harbor, 2023

Oil on panel

8h x 10w in

ET025

After Life / Amongst The Trees / Inversion / Greenbelt I

Installation View

Emma Tapley (b. 1967)

After Life / Amongst The Trees / Inversion / Greenbelt I, 2024

Oil on panel

24h x 30w x 2d in

ET017

Emma Tapley (b. 1967)

After Life / Amongst The Trees / Inversion / Greenbelt II, 2024

Oil on dibond

20h x 24w in

ET018

After Life / Amongst The Trees / Inversion / Greenbelt III, 2024

Installation View

Emma Tapley (b. 1967)

After Life / Amongst The Trees / Inversion / Greenbelt III, 2024

oil on dibond

20h x 24w in

ET016

EMMA TAPLEY: After Life / Amongst The Trees

Emma Tapley at DFN Projects; 16 East 79th Street, Garden Level, New York. Gallery hours are Monday - Friday, 11-4 and also by appointment upon request.

May 1 – 31, 2024

(New York, NY, Upper East Side) Garvey|Simon is pleased to present Emma Tapley: After Life / Amongst the Trees, opening May 1 at DFN Projects, 16 East 79th Street (garden level). The exhibition features a selection of Emma Tapley’s recent landscape paintings: quizzical depictions of forests, ponds, lakes, and skies. Tapley playfully manipulates her subjects–flipping, reflecting, and overturning them to reveal a fantastical realm. Emma Tapley: After Life / Amongst the Trees  is on view through May 31, 2024. There will be an opening reception on Wednesday, May 1 from 5-7pm at DFN Projects. The artist will be present. Gallery hours are Monday - Friday, 11-4 and also by appointment upon request.

 

Tapley’s dizzying new 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. 

 

Particularly enchanting is Tapley’s use of reflection. The veracity of her doubles is fickle: sometimes they appear as hard-edged facsimiles, and other times, waifish specters of their physical counterparts. The resulting effect is a slippage between reflection and reality, allowing the viewer to tumble into Tapley’s reversed world without even realizing it. Tapley offers these reflections as instances of resurrection; her vivid leaves, boney branches, and limitless skies finding rebirth in the surface of the water. Whether glassy and impenetrable, or punctuated by raindrops’ craters, Tapley uses a distorted sense of depth to transform these aquatic mirrors into portals, unveiling a reality at once near and far from our own.

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

 

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.