Born in Austin, Texas (b. 1979)

Emily Mae Smith

Daphne of the West, 2020

Oil on linen
© Emily Mae Smith; courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York.

Since 2011, Katz has been making paintings of roosters that she refers to as “cock paintings,” relishing the discomfort of the term. As she has acknowledged, these works reference the male ego: “The paintings are about masculinity, and about trying to work out the iconography of power, and the attraction to it.” The Other Side depicts a rooster in motion through a series of overlapping silhouettes, speed- ing from left to right in a way that recalls Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century photographic studies of moving forms. In each of the “cock paintings,” Katz sprinkles grains of rice onto the canvas and paints over them, creating an impasto texture that reinforces the works’ materiality in the face of painterly illusion. The title and imagery of The Other Side draw on the timeless antihumor of the road-crossing chicken.

Emily Mae Smith. Photo by Matteo Mobilio.

“I’ve played with symmetry for a while, and there’s a bilateral repetition on each side that is meant to invoke something conceptually through challenging perception. It’s also supposed to instigate something in the perceiver.”

—Emily Mae Smith

Emily Mae Smith

“I’ve played with symmetry for a while, and there’s a bilateral repetition on each side that is meant to invoke something conceptually through challenging perception. It’s also supposed to instigate something in the perceiver.”—Emily Mae Smith

“I’ve played with symmetry for a while, and there’s a bilateral repetition on each side that is meant to invoke something conceptually through challenging perception. It’s also supposed to instigate something in the perceiver.”

—Emily Mae Smith