Sarah Emerson's paintings and installations present viewers with highly stylized versions of nature that combine geometric patterns and symbolic archetypes to examine our cultural landscape. In her compositions, she distorts the physical laws that govern the real world because concepts like gravity, inertia, and locality do not govern our emotional perspective of the world. Emerson does not try to replicate nature or real space, instead she uses the familiar genre of landscape to explore the collective events and conditions that define our cultural landscape. In her career, she has worked on multiple painting series' and site-specific projects that use the ‘flatness’ of painting to explore themes that reflect on the fragility of life, the futility of earthly pleasures, and the disintegration of our natural landscape. As it is presented, painting can flatten events in time, space, and memory onto one picture plane allowing room for a reconciliation of otherwise incompatible states of being.
