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29 April / 04 June 2023
TROY EMERY
What will happen when the sun dies
Emery's artistic practice is focused on sculpture, with a particular interest in exploring the animal form. He often utilizes mass-produced, synthetic materials such as polyester fringing, pompoms, and tinsel to create colourful and vibrant sculptures of animals. Emery uses these materials to create artificial, technicolour pelts over animal forms, blurring the boundaries between fine art, museums, natural history, craft, and the domestic space.
Emery’s work also looks at his own personal anxiety as well as a collective anxiety around our position within the nature. He views the animal form as being representative of the other, an outsider to the experience of being human, and the precariousness of living beings time within the history and future of our universe. They function as both decorative motifs and tokens of ecological ruination and alienation.
His work’s obscure forms under lurid colour and textures, exploring a materiality through the use of mass-produced decorative craft components. These function as a point of opposition to the traditions of hard figurative sculpture. Emery takes much inspiration from ancient and classical sculpture and antiquities, using them as points of reference for work that contemplates humanity’s beginnings, future, and inevitable end.
Troy Emery has exhibited his work across Australia and internationally since graduating from a Masters of Fine Arts at The University of Sydney in 2009.
Troy’s work is held in various private and public collections, including National
Gallery of Victoria, Artbank, City of Townsville, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, Deakin University Art Museum, Deloitte Australia, Macquarie University Art Gallery, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, and Newcastle Art Gallery.
