A Closer Look

Emily Tironi was born and raised in Cambridge, NY in 1996. She was born with a muscle disease causing weakness and fatigue and the use of a wheelchair for long distances. She enjoyed all types of art since childhood and grew up entering her art in the Washington County Fair. Throughout high school, she loved art class and used drawing, painting and collage as an outlet for her struggles and a way to express herself. After graduating high school in 2014, she attended SUNY Adirondack and pursued a degree in media arts. Here, she discovered photography and began to photograph nature around her. In 2016, several of her photos were published in SUNY Adirondack’s literary magazine, Expressions. She also received SUNY Adirondack’s Parnassus Award in Graphic Arts. She graduated and transferred to CUNY School of Professional Studies in 2016 to pursue a degree in Disability Studies. While studying disability in cultural and societal aspects, she began to use her experiences as a person with a disability in her art. Studying Frida Kahlo in college, Emily was inspired by her surrealist style and expression of disability and self in her work. She was inspired to do larger, more layered works after taking an online workshop with outsider artist, Anne Grgich. She combines layered paper images and bright colors to create complicated pieces with unique messages. Her collages have been shown at area galleries and published in art publications. Her work was selected for the 31 Women exhibit at the Sedona Arts Center and she was part of the Emerging Artists 2020 exhibition at Limner Gallery in Hudson, NY. In August 2020, Emily had her first solo exhibition at Southern Vermont Art Center in Manchester, Vt. Throughout the pandemic, she has participated in several online artist residencies and exhibitions. Emily currently lives in Cambridge, NY and works on her collages daily.

I’m a multidisciplinary artist. I create drawings, poetry, and sculpture that center around resilience, decay, and liminality. Nature’s cycles show meaning and beauty in endings, a lesson that redefined my experiences with PTSD. My sculptures are made of organic matter. Creating pieces that mold, grow beyond the recognizable form or come undone draws attention to the temporary nature of all things. It feels poetic to represent a living thing or experience through pieces that are also bound by time. I often repurpose materials in my work as a deliberate act of gentleness towards ‘purposeless’ items. Reutilization values the present rather than habitually discarding for the new.   

Mediums include form, fiber, organic matter, ink, paint, poetry, digital, and sound. Recent work includes mini-sculptures: used tea bags tenderly shaped into ritualized expressions of stress and balance. They molded and dried into something lovely and stained. Embracing discomfort with the in-between is an act of resilience. It’s also essential; liminality is inherent in change, learning, and pushing the limits of definitions. I’m writing a book- poetry and drawings written over ten years of turbulence and renewal. I’ve begun drawing with thread- stacking wax paper and paint palettes and sewing linear patterns- the line quality and application are more similar to drawing than true sewing. Whatever medium, my goal is to create doors, through which we can meet ourselves and each other with compassion. 

I am an interdisciplinary artist exploring themes of metaphysics, identity, humor, scale, material and time through the mediums of illustration, assemblage, animation and sound. My body of work consists of tiny, cut paper dioramas in discarded objects (metal boxes, watches, tins, spoons, etc.), large drawings on tyvek and scrolls of paper, hand drawn stop motion animation, and sound recordings consisting of composed music, tape loops, musique concrète. I consider myself to be a surrealist, and an optimist.

I’m seeking exhibition opportunities for regional exposure, while developing an online presence with international reach. I’m hoping that, as my body of work grows, new opportunities will become available. In particular, I’m looking for opportunities to exhibit large scale drawings and projected animation.

Recent work includes animation screenings at animation festivals, and several public projections of silent films. A cassette of my film music was released on Scientifically Sound Records in December of 2021. I’ve been posting a series of experimental audio/video improvisations called S.Ex. (Sound Experiments) on my website. And I’ve continued to create cut paper dioramas

When I begin to create a new piece, I look away from traditional art materials to the things we use and encounter and every day. I enjoy the challenge of transforming something commonplace into a new object, keeping in mind the original purpose of the material when giving it new meaning. Although the materials I use are ordinary, I think they can make interesting statements about the world, human nature and the issues affecting all of us. With the new objects, I try to invoke a response by playing with scale and repetition, as well as with feelings of repulsion, intimacy and sometimes preciousness.

A lot of my works deals with issues that are serious or topics that I’m concerned about. In dealing with these issues, I prefer a subtle or humorous approach. Using the types of materials, I do with the forms I give them, I want my work to serve as a catalyst to the viewer, to see the day-to-day activities in their lives in a different way. That is why, aside from using common everyday materials I also incorporate everyday actions in producing a piece such as stapling or stamping.

I’m also very drawn to the absurdity of things I see around me. The crazy commutes we must use to get to where we make money and survival for ourselves. The politics of where we work and the monotonous actions of our jobs. Or how we destroy forested areas to build our homes and then replant trees in our own manicured sense of style. All these show up in the juxtapositions of things in my work: shirts with clear stick pins to mimic porcupine quills for the office worker seeking protective armor from his coworkers, or landscapes on bricks, with the landscapes turning the tables on a building material that usually alters the landscape. My inspiration does not come from the extraordinary but the everyday and the mundane, and with those I find endless amounts of inspiration.