Gary Emrich
Gary Emrich is a Denver-based artist who creates film, photographic and sculptural works. Emrich releases images and objects from their prescribed archives and reinvents them in his personal storehouse of art materials. With these materials, he investigates how people create personal memories and collective histories from the countless objects and impressions they accumulate on a daily basis. The artist also is interested in how and why humans endow certain objects, events, and images with special meaning by preserving them. And by bringing commonplace and historical events into direct contact with one another, Emrich hopes to raise questions about how we select and edit certain pieces of information to build the stories we tell about ourselves.
Emrich received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois in 1982. The artist has shown nationally for many years, including at many well-known Colorado institutions for the past several decades including Robischon Gallery, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, the Dairy Center, the Denver Art Museum, Spark Gallery, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities. His work is also in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Film Arts Anthology in New York, the City of Denver, the Denver Art Museum, and the Belger Museum in Kansas City Missouri.
Emrich’s featured work in The Space(s) Between is from his ALL CONSUMED series. ALL CONSUMED is a series of landscape photographs fabricated with advertising imagery of lush greenery, blue skies, and snow-capped mountains from the plastic wrappers on multipacks of bottled water. Addressing how the bottled water industry uses marketing tools to drive Americans to consume 50 billion bottles of water a year at 1000 times the cost of tap water, this project combines a marketing image of nature's purity with plastic waste products to call out the hypocrisy of consumer culture. This bottled water culture is not unique to America however. These landscape photographs are made from international packaging as well and address the impact of branding by the bottled water industry on consumers.
To make these ideas real, the artist layers a hard, transparent plastic "blister-pack" with water bottle packaging on a light table, fills the plastic depressions with bottled water, and photographs the composition with a view camera. He chooses to combine two of the first things we throw away, inverting the value of the things consumers buy by preserving and elevating the disposable and ubiquitous packaging and plastics to make trash an object of desire and beauty. Water as a commodity has been a subject in my art practice for over twenty years. Living in the high desert of the American West, his perspective on the value of water is shaped by watching water rights bought and sold; knowing that the geography of Colorado dictates that all the water eventually leaves and none flows back into the state.
