Emerald Rose Whipple
Born in California in 1989, Emerald Rose Whipple split her childhood between Ojai, California and Kauai, Hawaii. She received a BFA in Fashion Design from Pratt in 2012, after which she worked in design and styling for fashion houses and labels such as Marc Jacobs, Proenza Schouler, and Acne Studios. Since shifting to painting in 2014, Whipple's work has appeared in Dazed & Confused Magazine, Another Magazine, The Last Magazine, and has been featured in The Huffington Post, i-D Magazine, Women’s Wear Daily, HART Magazine, De Witte Raaf, Transmission Magazine and Engram. Currently, Whipple lives and works in New York City.
Emerald Rose Whipple's paintings begin with the ubiquity of the image, especially in terms of how fluency in what one might call a "dialect" of images – making them, manipulating them, sharing them, responding to them – has come to define how we now conjure the idea of "youth.” Each picture is a work of recovery, an attempt to recapture the fleeting moments of a fluid social world in which emotion and affect wax and wane at speed. The slow process of building the paintings up through distinct strokes and marks echoes both the low-res pixelation that so often indexes such fugitive moments, caught as they are in low-light settings and on devices with tiny lenses, as well as a history of art that has hinged on modernity and the ephemeral.
Nascent within Whipple's paintings is also a language of fashion design and styling that only a select few will be able to "read"; the pattern of a shirt, the fold of a cuff, or the role of a sleeve offers both an iconography of style as well as style's own recuperation as a concept and commentary on the art of today. Fashion is not the issue here as much as the way that clothes are and are not worn. Whipple's subjects are appearances that feature people – friends, acquaintances, mutuals – but are not portraits. They are fashioned with only minimal apparent effort. They wholly embrace the fact that the image and the screen will have their own way with them.
Light on the Water, Surfer's Cove 2
Light on the Water, Surfer's Cove 2, 2021, comes from a collection of works for which the New-York-City-based Emerald Rose Whipple returned to her roots in Hawaii and California. (Surfer's Cove is a break her father used to surf in the 1960s.) Rather than working with photographs as mere source material, however, Whipple embraces the vernacular of the digital image as so often an attempt to capture the affective qualities of a particular place or moment. A sunset, a particular vista, a bewitching time of day – the images of these things suffuse our smartphones and cloud storage. They are testaments to a desire to relive or remember certain feelings or moods. Whipple renders these images, but through cropping, composition, and technique, what she represents is those affective qualities that attach themselves to images and could be said to have generated them in the first place.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2023 Summer Crush, Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, NY
2021 Anne Claire Simon, Paris, France
2019 Emerald Rose Whipple, The World of McIntosh Townhouse, New York, NY
2018 Spiritus, Galerie Jan Dhaese, Ghent BE
2018 Anima Mundi, The Teaching Gallery HVCC, Hudson Valley NY
2017 Phædo, Galerie Jan Dhaese, Ghent BE
2016 Primavera, Rivington Design House, New York, NY
2016 Ná Áumākua Ānuenue, Sheppard Contemporary, Reno NV
2016 Genesis: Let there be Light, Galerie Jan Dhaese, VOLTA Art Fair, NY, New York, NY
2015 Queens Bath, SecondRoom, Ghent BE
2015 Mid-Heaven, Fair Folks & a Goat, New York, NY
2015 Eden, Galerie Jan Dhaese, Ghent, BE
2014 Natural High, Rivington Design House, New York, NY
2013 Lichen, Art Alternative Gallery, Brookline, MA
2012 High Frequency, Rivington Design House, New York, NY
2012 Reflections, Art Alternative Gallery, Brookline, MA
Selected Group Exhibitions and Screenings
2023 Apoca, Curated by Tara Fracalossi and Thomas Lail, Spring Break Art Fair New York
2019 Tabula Rasa – The Watermill Center’s 26th Annual Summer Benefit & Auction, New York, NY
2019 The Calling Poválni, Curated by Jan Dhaese & Jan Van Woensel, Galerie Jan Dhaese, Gent, BE
2019 Clear Objects, Like Lalique, Curated by Nick Farhi, Ventanas Techo, Mexico City
2019 Orbweavers, Curated by Kari Adelaide, Project ArtSpace New York, NY
2018 Mist Wreathed, Spring Break Art Fair, New York, NY
2018 Ritual Night, Curated by Jan Van Woensel, Bibliotheek Driehoek, Ekeren, BE
2016 Just Give Me a Happy Middle, Alexandra Rose, Aliza Morell, Anne Vieux, Emerald Rose Whipple, Heath West,
Jeannette Hayes, Nick Farhi, Signe Pierce Castor Gallery, New York, NY
2016 Retna Art16 London, London UK
2015 Violet Red in Green and Blue, Artifact Gallery, New York, NY
2015 Reality’s Touch, 57 Pitt, New York, NY
2014 Hotel Deauville, ABMB, Miami, FL
2014 Artificial Paradise, Dau al Set, New York, NY
2014 Transmission Transform, Le Baron New York, NY
2013 Transmission Transparency, Rox Gallery New York, NY
2012 Holiday Market Rivington Design House New York, NY