About Emily Ferguson
Emily Ferguson (born in 1998 in San Rafael, California) is a painter based in Los Angeles. Ferguson began her art education at Mira Costa College, where she studied Creative and Applied Arts. In 2019, she left school to pursue a more formal artistic practice, working from her studio in Los Angeles and assisting other painters as she developed her first body of work. Ferguson’s painting style is poised and elusive, dancing between the aesthetics of learned femininity and the nuances of emotional life. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group presentations in Los Angeles, New York, and abroad, including LA Woman at Phillips, Los Angeles, Horizons at Sow and Tailor, Hong Kong, and Willows Weep, her debut solo exhibition at Prince & Wooster, New York. 

Prince & Wooster is pleased to present Willows Weep, a solo exhibition by Emily Ferguson. Comprising twenty-six paintings, this ambitious series projects Ferguson’s explorations of cinematic and editorial reference onto a wider angle—a simultaneously familiar and mysterious dreamscape of brushstrokes. 

This body of work was born from Ferguson’s fixation with Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona, the story of an actress and a nurse who—during a retreat to a remote natural landscape—reflect and refract the haunting nuances that unite them. As she visited and revisited the film, Ferguson mirrored her own investigation into the feminine interior and exterior: learned, performed, experienced, and invented. The reference became her muse, a departure point that opened her imagination to the ways in which her practice flows between input, output, and projection. Willows Weep unfolds not unlike one of the final scenes in Persona: Bibi Andersson folds her profile into Liv Ullmann’s shadow—merging two sides of the same woman—as one says to the other: “I’ll never be like you. I change all the time.” 

When developing a canvas, Ferguson begins with ferociously compiling references, images of women who have imprinted on her memory through sartorial, cinematic, and social platforms. Drawn to faces that encapsulate complexity and emotion, she discovers a figure, removes it from a familiar context, distorts it through double exposure, and collages it into an existing archive of images until a composition emerges. While the artist has a preternatural ability for painting with precision, she invites materials that encourage a looseness in her hand. Like leaves that fall with the changing seasons—sifting and scattering across the canvas—her paintings develop an organic narrative through their gradual release of an aesthetic principle: sharp then blurred, saturated then muted, lucid then surreal.

Willows Weep is a tribute to the 1932 song Willow Weep for Me composed by Ann Ronell—one of the few female composers of the Jazz Age. Ronell’s verses speak to a loss that is deeply felt but cannot be placed in one particular person or experience. Over the past century, this melody has been played in a variety of arrangements and performed by a litany of musical artists; though rooted in a well-known tune, no one version is exactly the same. Like jazz standards, Ferguson’s personas and scenes are mimetic, delivered through the metamorphic sieve of her fascinations and memories. In the company of her imagined cast of women, her canvases are portals into a cinematic universe all her own.