Pushing materials beyond their conventional manipulations, Emma Safir creates works that balance digital and physical labor, often acting as “portals” to transport viewers. Her practice explores themes of labor, intimacy, and domestic privacy by layering historical and conceptual information in unexpected ways. In this conversation, we discuss the tensions at play in her work—control and freedom, clarity and ambiguity—along with the histories that inform them. Safir's upcoming solo exhibition, Uyt Den Gheest, will be on view at HESSE FLATOW from September 5 through October 4, 2025. She will also be presented at their booth in The Armory Show.
Parker Ewen: Congratulations on your upcoming solo show Uyt Den Gheest. Can you walk me through how your career has progressed up to this point?
Emma Safir: I was born in the city but grew up in New Jersey and went to RISD for printmaking. After RISD, I moved to Los Angeles, did some jewelry design, and even had a handbag company for a few years. I realized I didn’t care about functionality, which tipped the scales back towards making art. I moved back to the East Coast, did a series of residencies, worked at a couple of print shops, and then went to Yale for graduate school in 2019 for painting and printmaking.
When I came back, I worked with curator Sally Eaves Hughes on the solo exhibition Glitches & Veils at Baxter St., featuring my photographic collages printed on textiles. That set me up in a really wonderful way.
PE: That show looked amazing. How was it having the photographic nature of your work so highlighted?
ES: It was interesting because my work often resists qualification or description—is it painting, textile, or photography? Being in a photo context had never occurred to me. Even though I take and use photos, I don’t think of myself as a photographer, but being in that context was incredible and changed how the work was being perceived. It clarified my relationship to digital work, and after that came the show peripeteia at Blade Study, curated by Andrew Gardner. I did NADA last year with HESSE FLATOW and Blade Study, ended up working with HESSE FLATOW, and here we are.
I also co-curated this past HESSE FLATOW summer show Veronica, Veronica with Andrew Gardner, based on an obsession with the Veil of Veronica. It was exciting to bring in artists with whom I feel in conversation in terms of materiality, copies, and image disintegration.
