A Benign God

There’s an eerie familiarity to Emma Stern’s work—like you have seen it before, somewhere definitely on the web, or perhaps on your little cousin’s gaming screen(s), maybe on the sidebar on Pornhub, calling to you, “Hey Cowboy.” Her uncanny women are all around us, really. They’re aggressively hot, quicksilver-drenched, O.G. Instagram baddies: big boobs, big lips, big hair, big butts, big attitude. And Stern has built them their own space, a synthetically colored wonderland where men barely exist, and the girlies get to flop around in pools, engage in some piracy and looting, tame dragons, work out, and act out like rockstars. Stern is a benign God, or, as she puts it, “God-like in her little sandbox,” sitting in front of 3-D modeling software, churning out computer-generated worlds, toggling with light and shadow until she finds the right frame, the one that will, within her economy of elements, better evoke an expansive world of illusion.

Stern herself is an art siren, with intense blue eyes canopied by thin, hot-girl brows. She grew up in New Jersey but has been based in NYC since her years at Pratt Institute, where she earned her BFA. Her work is truly technophilic—if you broaden that to include a larger conception of human-image creation-as-technology. Think about it: For thousands of years humans have chosen painting as one of the preeminent ways to represent ourselves, even today when photography, film and C.G.I. exist. It’s odd! For Stern, it’s quite obvious. In her words, “painting is the original virtual reality,” one of the first available windows into other worlds, enlivening history, religion, or magic, one frame at a time. And in fact, “The Rabbit Hole,” her show at Half Gallery, which opened during Armory Week in September, delves into magic as another enduring human interest, today hoarded in the realm of futurism and posthumanism, our newer forms of playing God.

The artist is God-like, but not naïve. And she finds that generative A.I., which spits out unwieldy pictures of whatever text prompt we feed it, is simply not as good at her job as she is. Sure, her images borrow from algorithmically furnished web content, but only to the extent that “A.I. and its algorithms are based on us, created to satisfy our preferences, motivated by the same desire that reproduces female-hotness tropes all over the internet,” as she reasons. We recognize Stern’s archetypes because we have been honing them forever in our representations of women, from art history and up to porn and video games. As she tussles with that lineage, she’s still stuck on painting, “in love with painting” even, keeping its image-making O.S. updated through her plastic-fantastic fiction and synthetic-dreaming subjectivities.