Emma Webster | kate, this is about us: paintings when we were close

"kate, this is about us: paintings of when we were close" is a catalogue for a 2013 exhibition by up-and-coming Oakland artist Emma Webster. The exhibition will be up at 411 26th street from August 2nd through September 21st, 2013.

Each of the exhibition catalogue's abstracted colorscapes portrays Emma Webster, her sister, and their childhood puppy, a doberman named Ted. The strength of Webster’s painting practice lies in both what one sees on the surface from afar, as well as the layers lurking beneath.

The exhibition and catalogue title and the cryptic textual portion of her paintings mark Webster's attempt to reach out to her sister; to write confessions and regrets in a child-like manner with the similarly child-like mediums of marker and crayon as a feeble attempt to reconnect to a bygone time of kinship. Using family home videos as source material to reach back in time, Webster's paintings are haunted, nostalgic, and yearning for a time “when we were close”.