UNREAL PET PROJECT
Troy Emery knows what he wants to make and how to make it. His work is polished, lush, tightly presented and made with skill and attention to the smallest of details. His work doesn’t fall into the expressionist category: it’s slow, meticulous, and has much in common with those realms of creative culture that are not generally understood as high art. There are hints of embroidery and weaving in the way Emery makes his work. It’s clearly time consuming, and not one of the brightly coloured threads he uses is even remotely out of place.
Indeed, each thread has been cut to a particular length, just like the pelt of an actual animal. There is nothing real or natural about these beasts though. Emery uses man-made materials – polyurethane, polyester, rayon – and every one of his sculptures has that slick glow of non-life, and yet the artist makes works that are sharply reminiscent of domestic animals. We are reminded of our own pets sitting or lying in familiar poses. This is something Emery does well: his works have the posture of real animals, but they are the wrong colours. Nothing in nature is quite the same colour as his glowing pink work, Second
Lump. The yellow toxic Pelted Watcher is a glowing fluorescent yellow-green and the sculpture really lives up to its label: it feels like it’s poisonous in some way, yet it’s also a really beautiful object.
All of the beasts glow vibrantly — they are as unreal as something digitally constructed to appear real, but which could only exist on a screen. Yet still they sit in such realistic ways. After a while, something else emerges from the work. It would be easy to miss if one just glanced at these sculptures and thought them to be pretty, almost vacuous confections, and nothing more, but eventually, the realism of the postures begins to seep with a vague sensation of the uncanny.
The artificiality of the works is undermined by the wafting hint of real life that is there but is not, and something uncomfortable is hinted at — just like one of those new robots that look almost human but are not, so too Emery’s beautiful, playful sculptural animals do not sit comfortably in themselves.
Beneath the surface, it’s clear there is something else going on, and the questions about what it is that we are really looking at become enticingly complex.