Emily Newman
Emily Newman (b. 1977)
Emily Newman was born in Singapore in 1977, raised in the UK and is currently based between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and St Petersburg, Russia. She received her MFA from CalArts in 2004 and has shown internationally including at the Taylor De Cordoba gallery in Los Angeles, the Anna Akhmatova Museum in St Petersburg and the Klaus Von Nitchtssagend Gallery in New York where she has been represented since 2004. Her work has been critically reviewed in publications such as Art Review, The Los Angeles Times and Artforum Intl, where she has contributed reviews since 2007.
Her latest works draw from her time spent in Russia and explore methods of attaining historical and self-knowledge through model-building and imaginative reconstruction. Polytechnicheskaya, Don’t Love Here, 2012, is a 15 minute film which takes on the topic of a St Petersburg suburb which has served as a drawing-board for the future based on ideological values of no less than three distinct historical periods in the last century (Pre-Revolutionary, Soviet and Contemporary.) Newman worked with local children, nuclear physicists at a local institute, and activist-artists from the area to produce a three-part work which creates an image of the present to deflect for a moment the continual process of future-building which seems so accelerated here.