Emma Abad

Been Here Before: Exploring the Bronx

Mixed media artist Emma Abad utilizes a combination of photography, watercolor, illustration and collage; both analog and digital, to explore the relationship between real life and fantasy. With the use of photographs and digital manipulation, the artist distorts colors and shapes cut from her images and layers them together to create these fantastical scenes. Using vibrant colors and dramatic patterns, Emma likes to create dreamlike illustrations that tug at an unsure sense of reality, blurring the lines between what the viewer experiences in daydreams and what they experience in concrete reality.

In this case, that reality takes the form of a familiar place, The Bronx.

This new series Been Here Before created specifically for the ARTViews Gallery at the Montefiore Medical Center, invokes the people, places and things many of the viewers will find familiar with a slight twist. This exception is the play on colors and textures, transporting those who view the work into an abstract and out-of- body place. Similar to the experience of deja vu, these images may feel familiar, but seem distant all the same.

Is this place home? Can you identity with these streets? Have you been here before? Whether or not you have, this exhibition forces the viewer to place themselves into this new invented experience of The Bronx.