Glowlab is pleased to present Modern Ruins, a solo exhibition of works by Emily Henretta featuring two new series of monoprint collages and a multimedia site-specific installation. Glowlab will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, September 10, 2009 from 7-9 pm.

Henretta’s new body of work voices her long-standing interest in the intersection of built and natural envi-rons from a contemporary vantage. The artist acknowledges a moment in time when frenetic con-struction, blurred ideas of ownership and natural disasters have stripped buildings of purpose. Structures – unowned, unoccupied and largely incomplete – become purely visual objects. The artist sees these unlikely monuments as evidence of both excess and poverty simultaneously and finds beauty in their nascent decay.

Her earlier collages were ripe with careful, meticulous pen work and judicious in their handling of color. For Modern Ruins, the pieces are awash with dramatic planes of pigment and studded with screenprinted and collaged found imagery culled from vintage publications. Additionally, the artist will construct a site-specific installation that will liaise the images she makes with the complex system of building materials they portray.

Metabolist ideas of modularity and interchangeable urban constructs are referenced in the artist’s process and her finished works. Images of buildings, abandoned developments and construction materials are introduced and reworked throughout each image and series. Ultimately these reiterated images function as building materials themselves – similar constituents manipulated to construct diverse aesthetic results.

Emily Henretta graduated from Columbia with a BA in History in 2004 and has completed a residency at the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited at the International Print Center New York and at Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ.