Emily Ludwig Shaffer


Bio: Emily Ludwig Shaffer (b. 1988 / San Francisco, CA) was raised in California, Ohio, Nebraska and Kentucky, attended undergrad at the Rhode Island School of Design, and has been living in New York for seven years.


Thesis Exhibition

Artist Statement: I think about banality often, or the uncanny accessed through banality, and how it arises in the places and things we see everyday and relegate as insignificant and mundane. For instance, how a disposable coffee cup, a potted plant, or the minor glimmer of a landscape reflected in a glass vase can have an expressive capacity, a specificity of time and place. 

The image to the right is the scene out of my studio window here at Columbia. My view is dominated by this new campus, and has been the backdrop and subject of many recent works. If you can find a window in this exhibition with the shade up, look out—you will be looking at some of my paintings from behind, so to speak. This newly minted architecture that we stand in has been a big grey thing visible through my three windows, framed as a triptych, like the portrait of the elephant in my studio. Any vague relation my work has had to architecture in the past has been heightened over the past year by my day to day montage of this building's erection, and a surrounding view of the city.

I constructed a few buildings too, at a much different scale. They are semi-carpeted structures like the cat trees people put in their homes for cats to dwell in. I've read that cats like to be elevated, and, in order to keep the domesticated feline's anxiety levels low, it's best to provide interconnected and lofted spaces. These are for me and you, however, so I welcome you to sit in and walk through the space.

L to R: A Cup (21 ½″ × 18″, Oil on canvas, acrylic on wood frame, 2015); My Jungle (73 ¾″ × 61 ¾″, Oil on canvas, wood frame, 2016)

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