Fractured Myths and Pixelated Truths: Emilia on Art and Identity

PERCY: Tell me more about the piece you’ve created for this cohort and how it reflects the theme of identity.

EMILIA: The piece I’ve created for this cohort is an oil painting of a pixelated portrait of myself with scattered colorful puzzle pieces, some highlighting different colors and some focusing on different areas of my face. While creating this piece, I was thinking about identity as a whole and how all of my work is about my identity, which I have a complicated relationship with. I thought of the puzzle pieces as different aspects of my personality and how it forms an overall intersectional identity - woman, first-generation American, queer, etc. while the pixelation also acts as a way to hide or abstract myself.

PERCY: Your work draws deeply from personal experiences, mythology, and themes of evolution. How do these influences come together in your art, and what drives you to focus on these subjects?

EMILIA: I focus on the themes in my work as a way to recreate stories and the morals within them in a feminist lens and as a way to work through religious trauma. All of these influences come together in my work naturally as they are part of what shape my identity and allow me to create my version of storytelling, one that I have autonomy in.

PERCY: Pixelation and repetition is a unique feature of your style. What inspired you to incorporate it into your practice, and how does it connect to the larger messages in your work?

EMILIA: In some of my older work when I first started painting, I focused on small, repetitive brush strokes going in the same direction and eventually decided to do some fully pixelated little paintings to see how far I could push the abstraction of an image before it is no longer recognizable. I found it interesting to observe how quickly the brain can interpret the pixelation as a whole image, and viewing pixelated paintings from up close, where they are just boxes of colors side by side, versus far away, where you see the image in its entirety. When I think about why I’m drawn to pixelation, I also can’t help but think back to when I was younger, sitting so close to the TV in the living room where I could see the small pixels that made up my favorite cartoons and shows.

 I enjoy using pixelation in oil painting as it feels like digitizing this ancient medium and paying homage to my childhood of being on the internet too much.

PERCY: You’ve embraced a collage-like process, both physical and digital, in creating your pieces. What does this method bring to your exploration of identity and storytelling?

EMILIA: When I start to create new pieces, the collaging process is another form of introspection for myself. I get to sit down with unlimited materials (whether it be my folders upon folders of cut-out magazine pages or the multiple tabs of free-use imagery on my computer) and figure out what sticks out to me and why. Sometimes creating the collage idea for the piece is like putting together a puzzle, where I have a bunch of pieces that could fit and my task is to narrow it down to what I believe translates the story the best. 

PERCY: As someone who has created work inspired by religious trauma and feminist reinterpretations of myths, how do you see your art contributing to broader conversations about gender and identity?

EMILIA: I believe being a queer woman, the experiences and beliefs I have are not uncommon amongst other women and other queer people, which allows others to be seen and have space to have conversations about things like misogyny in organized religion, the erasure of queer artists, etc. 

Below are some captures of Emilia’s previous works that demonstrate their portrait and pixelation art style.

PERCY: Community seems to play a large role in your art journey, from organizing DIY exhibitions to working in a shared studio space. How has collaboration and being part of a collective influenced your perspective and process?

EMILIA: Collaboration and being around other artists always influences my perspective and process. I love the shared environment of a studio with other artists, especially of different mediums. Having a shared studio allows me to interact with others in my community and think about how we can share skills, inspire each other, bounce ideas to and from, and simply rant about how we hate not being able to be in the studio all the time. I think my process does involve a lot of vulnerability and being alone, which makes the moments where friends and artists alike come together that much more important, in hearing their thoughts and ideas.

PERCY: What do you hope audiences take away from your work, especially when it comes to the intersection of humor, irony, and the serious themes you explore?

EMILIA: I hope that audiences can relate to the notion of creating your own story and having a voice as a marginalized person – and that you can be sarcastic and angry about it in the process. 

PERCY: Are there any forms of music that guide or inspire you in your creative process, either for this current piece or past ones?

EMILIA: Music and literature inspire my process and pieces so much! I don’t work without listening to something, recently I’ve been delving more into audiobooks as well. Music-wise, I find the work of Julien Baker, Lingua Ignota, and Ethel Cain to be very inspirational – all use religious imagery in their work. Recent audiobooks I’ve enjoyed while creating have been: Down the Drain by Julia Fox, Who’s Afraid of Gender? By Judith Butler and The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi. 

You can see Emilia’s full final project by purchasing 03: The Identity Issue.