DIVE INTO EMILY KRILL’S SEA OF PAPER

by Emma Riva

In the late-1800s, railroad shares were worth huge sums of money. A single piece of paper held immense value, enough to feed a family, pay off a loan, or finally buy that dress you’d seen in the Kaufmann’s window. Now, that railroad share is worth zero-point-zero dollars, and you can find it in the background of artist Emily Krill’s collage, Player Piano Beach.

Krill’s work isn’t what viewers might typically think of as collage. Rather than mishmash together discordant sources, she builds a compositional image out of textured paper and uses the two-dimensional materials to create the image. “When I see collages I don’t like, it’s often that there aren’t enough curves. Photographic collage doesn’t really interest me,” she explained. “I’m going for almost a mid-century modern style, big, strong, shapes with energy and movement.”

The result is work that straddles the line between what people might think of as “decorative”—aesthetically pleasing, familiar compositions most often found more in the home than in a gallery—and what you’d be more likely to find in a gallery or museum. The distinction between the two is fairly recent, and Krill’s work challenges viewers to think about what value we give objects around us and why. Her materials include homework, blueprints, ledgers, music notation, and canceled checks. She gets them from a “paper dealer,” a particular subset of the antiques dealing world.

“I’m always someone who haunts antique shops,” she said. Sometimes, the paper materials she finds become floors or walls in figurative images of rooms. Other times, they simply morph into abstracted shapes. Or, they become lemons and oranges. One of Krill’s favorite subjects is citrus fruits. “I just find something joyful about them,” she said. “And people are really delighted by the collages like this.” In a previous life, Krill was a food blogger specializing in meals accessible to diabetics, so she spent a lot of time taking photographs of food and seeing the unique curvature and details in it. The attention to detail is apparent in Krill’s practice, but it never feels overly meticulous or stale. Her process is also improvisational, she explained: “I just kind of play it as it lays. I didn’t intend for things to go where they were.”

Even when Krill creates a still life, there’s a real sense of movement from the mixture of materials. There are few other places where you’ll find 1910 Freeman’s Lodge meeting minutes and ink-washed 1899 municipal ledgers, which appear in Committee Notes.

Krill’s creations have a sort of atemporality to them. They speak to how in modern life, with access to so much information from the past, it becomes a part of the present. This is particularly true of Spelling Practice, where a 1940s spelling notebook, an 1870s wall pattern, a 1970s wall pattern, and a Victorian family portrait collide to make up a room that is simultaneously within all of those time periods and none of them. At one point, Krill had access to an archive of one pair of siblings’ homework over their entire lives, so she watched them grow up in the archive.

Krill takes collage seriously as an art form. Her work demands that of the people that see it. Where it’s easy for art world literati to dismiss collage as kitsch, I saw a connection in Krill’s work to luminaries Raymond Saunders and Barbara Kruger—she has a curiosity about materials and their histories and a facility with transforming them into something new.

Canceled Check Sunset, though meditative to look at, feels like a reflection on how fleeting these notes of value really are. The canceled check from a department store in Wisconsin becomes the foreground of a sunset, reminding us that no matter how important the minutia of daily life is, all things come from nature. Even currency is just paper. One day, we all return to the seas, sunsets, and fruit trees that make up the world, more powerful and more ancient than promissory notes and meeting minutes could ever be.

Color Stories, featuring Emily Krill and Julia Toal, is open at Atithi Studios through September 13, with a closing reception 6PM-9PM on September 13.