BIO
Emily Kray, is a visual artist working primarily with watercolor and book arts to investigate the complexities and fallacies of memory by manipulating our attachment to nostalgic and familiar forms. He began his artistic career by living and working in Las Vegas, Nevada and received his BFA from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2020. That same year, he began his MFA at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He has participated in group shows nationally since 2016 and has had solo shows across Nevada and in Arizona. Since then, Kray continues to make art with a focus on community involvement and volunteer work and has graduated with his MFA in the Spring of 2023.
"50 Days of Remembering", watercolor on paper, 50 individual studies of remembering on 2"x6.5" paper, 2021.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My body does not forget and through dreaming, I revisit many warped and maze-like iterations of my childhood. These intangible moments that surface from my unconscious show me that the longing I feel towards my past is linked to my sociopolitical upbringing, my gender and sexuality, and my relationship to my mental health. By layering my personal experiences with larger theories about how the body processes and reformulates memories, my artwork combines both fact and fiction to simulate the slippery process of remembering.
I make artist books and design games to explore the mechanics of how we remember. I collage photographs, paintings, and stories together to create dissonance between memory, reality, and dreams. Visually, I utilize repetition to represent the stages of remembrance in decay, and the comparison of repeated elements emphasizes the differences between the recalled, the real, and the imagined. Within my installations I raise questions about the complexity of how our bodies create, store, and reflect the past.