Biographical Information:
Emily Hoerdemann is a Pasadena-based multidisciplinary artist working in painting, analog collage, and photography. Her practice explores the evolution of memory, the relationship between color and perception, the contradictions inherent in representations of the American Dream, and the construction of value within the art market.
Hoerdemann received her BFA in Painting and Photography from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, and a Master's in Contemporary Art from Sotheby's Institute of Art in New York. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and London, featured in the Los Angeles Times and Forbes, and is held in private collections.
In addition to her artistic practice, Hoerdemann has an extensive background in contemporary art collection management and archival preservation.
Artist Statement:
My work explores the evolution of memory and the relationship between perception, representation, and abstraction. Working across painting, analog collage, and photography, I am interested in how images and experiences are preserved, fragmented, and reconstructed over time. Through processes of selection, repetition, and reorganization, I examine what remains when familiar imagery is removed from its original context.
In my paintings, I explore color as both subject and structure, often using the natural world as a starting point for abstraction. My Floral Palettes series translates the colors found within flowers, gardens, and landscapes into fields of individually painted marks. Rather than depicting a flower or landscape directly, I reduce the source to its chromatic relationships, allowing color itself to become a record of place, atmosphere, and experience.
Each composition begins with observation and an act of selection. I isolate elements from their original context, whether a palette of colors, a photographic fragment, or a familiar image, and reorganize them into new visual relationships. Through this process, the source material becomes both recognizable and transformed, inviting viewers to reconsider how images communicate meaning.
I am interested in what remains when an image is stripped of its original form or context. Memory, like abstraction, is selective. It preserves certain details while allowing others to recede, transforming an experience through the act of remembering it. My work occupies this space between observation and recollection, exploring the ways images and experiences are reshaped through time, perception, and interpretation.
