Emmette Lewis

I am a Canadian and South African artist who is now based in Toronto, Ontario. I understand art as an unparalleled gateway that channels emotional expression and creative consciousness into a visual language. Primarily, my creative focus regards subjects around eco-maintenance and social activism by composing diverse visual narratives. Through collecting and recycling organic and synthetic materials, I create abstract reflections of our relationship with nature. These reflections then become an intimate representation of how our environments shape our core. Most often I exhibit these principals through expressionist portraiture and anomalous figures with an ambiguous lens of stylized and structural beauty. Within the juxtaposing form of imagery, the subject of my works asks the audience to question the relationship between the apparent and the hidden; to consider what exists beyond what is seen. In doing this, my portraits coalesce within the abstract foreground, intricately intertwining self and environment. The merging of my subjects aims to celebrate the very theology of nature's divine energy with the divine feminine. The themes that captivate me within my work are inspired by obscuring realities and questioning representation. I do this in my artistic practice by playing with images that embrace both the familiar and the uncanny. The foundation of my subjects explore ideas that look to be devoid of traditional adaptations of beauty. My paintings fashion identities that are reflective of personal intimacies, relationships, and memories of my community.