EMMA JUNE JONES
B. 2000, Chicago, IL
Lives and works in New York, NY
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At the beginning, drawing realistic portraits was my primary point of entry. Creating intimate images of the people closest to me was the only way I knew how to access something emotional and honest. Growing up in a household marked by neglect and substance abuse, I found a kind of solitude in my room, drawing for hours, often until my head hit the desk.
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After leaving my childhood home in Chicago, I sought refuge in Savannah, where color began to enter the work. While working in the service industry to support myself through school, I found a sense of home in my friendships. I began photographing those around me and bringing them into my paintings. What started as portraiture expanded into full-body scenes, layered with animals, symbolic objects, and charged environments, as a way of processing growth and moving through the weight of past relationships.
After moving to New York, my process shifted. The figures became closer to self-portraiture, even when they weren’t explicitly me, absorbed in social norms, political boundaries, and the anxieties of living within a dense, fast-moving city. Painting remains central, but everything begins in my sketchbook, which functions as a kind of diary, filled with fragments of thought and recurring, almost imaginary companions. Each drawing exists in color from the start, though only a few evolve into paintings. When they do, they expand into constructed scenes where a single figure generates a sense of time, place, and psychological atmosphere.
As the work continues to evolve, it moves in cycles, shifting with seasons, relationships, and internal states. Humor, tension, and vulnerability coexist within compressed, often claustrophobic spaces. Animals in the work act less as companions and more as emotional surrogates, mirroring instinct, threat, protection, or desire. Objects function as quiet indicators of control and collapse, domestic items, fragments of environments, or symbolic props that suggest what has happened or what is about to. Clothing and fashion become a kind of psychological armor: stylized, exaggerated, or disrupted, they signal identity as something constructed, performed, and at times unraveling.
More recently, male figures have entered the work more directly, reflecting my own lived experiences of intimacy and connection. These figures, lovers, friends, family, even doubles of the self, emerge not from direct reference as I did in the past, but from memory, fixation, and emotional immediacy. The boundaries between them remain fluid, collapsing into one another as the narrative unfolds.
My work has been presented in a range of group exhibitions across New York and beyond, including Intimate Structures at FLOHAUS Gallery (2026), What Rain Tells You at Flowing Space Gallery (2025), and My Need for Tender Loving Care at All Street Gallery (2024), among others. Earlier presentations include Just Like Heaven at Random Access Gallery and Sanctuary at Galerie Shibumi. These exhibitions reflect an ongoing engagement with narrative figuration and evolving psychological space within contemporary painting.
