Washed: Dustin Emory

To wash is to remove. Dirt, sweat, traces of the day. Water passes over the body, carrying away what has accumulated. Yet the gesture is repeated day after day, bringing us back to the same body, the same routines, the same private space. Each washing promises a fresh start, only for the cycle to begin again.

In Dustin Emory’s exhibition washed cleansing becomes an ambiguous act. The six paintings in the exhibition all take place in a bathroom, or what we recognize as one. Walls, floors and tiled surfaces merge, perspectives shift, and a solitary figure appears partially concealed by shadows, curtains or elements of the room. At times, it is difficult to distinguish the figure from its surroundings. The body seems to become part of the architecture, while the space itself takes on an almost bodily presence. We find ourselves looking in without quite knowing where we are standing. Once a communal activity, bathing has largely become a private ritual. The bathroom is perhaps the most private room in a home, where the body is exposed yet protected from the outside world. A place to withdraw, undisturbed. Yet in Emory’s paintings, where the same figure reappears in variations of this enclosed space, the intimacy of the room begins to feel increasingly oppressive. What offers a moment of solitude also seems to hold the figure in place.

For several years Emory has worked with a single house that he constructed as a three-dimensional model on his computer. He continually returns to these imagined rooms, shifting perspectives and light before translating the scenes into painting. The precision of this process contrasts with the uncertainty of the resulting images. Built up through successive layers of translucent oil paint, forms emerge and dissolve, their boundaries softened by light and shadow. The effect recalls the first moments of waking, when the eyes have opened but the world is still blurry.

The works’ muted blacks, greys and milky whites evoke the visual language of psychological cinema, where the familiar and the strange quietly coexist. There is a feeling of having entered a scene midway through, with no knowledge of what came before or what might follow. Time seems suspended, perhaps caught in repetition. Some experiences remain with us long after their origins have faded. Dustin Emory revisits the same imagined house, the same solitary figure, yet each painting reveals something different. Each return offers another perspective, but never a way out.

Text by Tessa Praun, The Wanderlust Institute of Art