EMILY FERGUSON: IF YOU WANT, I’LL BE YOUR STAR

Half Gallery is pleased to presents If you want, I’ll be Your Star, Emily Fergubon’s latest exhibition in Los Angeles.

January 14 – February 17, 2024

Figures swathed in ribbons as though wrapped in a breeze or a melody, Emily Ferguson borrows from music, cinema, art history and her own biography for this latest exhibition in Los Angeles.

The title track of the show is a heavily chiarascuro-ed underpainting capturing an adolescent moment of exuberance, a feeling echoed in “Dancer” albeit a more specified form of activation. The painter had recently rewatched the 1948 movie “Red Shoes” based on the Hans Christian Andersen story and decided to put her pirouette on this ballet narrative. In real life, Emily considers herself more of a tomboy and likes that her femininity finds a release in these compositions.

“Adorned” explores this tension with a young woman sporting a decidedly butch flight cap in the style of Amelia Earhart, but specked with tiny colorful bows, a direct reference to the artists late grandmother who was a seamstress. Perhaps the North Star of the exhibition is a self-portrait done in the style of Alice Neel’s famous nude: a repose of empowerment and vulnerability.

Emily Ferguson (born in 1998 in San Rafael, California) is a painter based in Los Angeles. Ferguson began her art education at Mira Costa College, where she studied Creative and Applied Arts. In 2019, she left school to pursue a more formal artistic practice, working from her studio in Los Angeles and assisting other painters as she developed her first body of work.

Ferguson’s painting style is poised and elusive, dancing between the aesthetics of learned femininity and the nuances of emotional life. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group presentations in Los Angeles, New York, and abroad, including LA Woman at Phillips, Los Angeles, Horizons at Sow and Tailor, Hong Kong, and Willows Weep, her debut solo exhibition at Prince & Wooster, New York.