Emilie Duval: Processing Society

“Processing” is a word with many meanings in today’s society. It’s a common function in a variety of industries and has also become part of psychoanalytic and self-help lingo, as in “processing” experiences, which has a connotation of fluidity but is also somehow mechanical. Within the works of Emilie Duval in the exhibition Processing Society, one might read the dual meanings of a society consumed with the act of “processing” everything—including its members—as well as the individual processing the overwhelming, over-saturated experience of living in the midst of that society, immersed in media as it has become.

Currently residing in Belgium, the French-born artist, who has shown her work internationally as well as at the now-defunct Livingroom gallery in Salt Lake City, was awarded a degree in art history from L’École du Louvre Paris and a law degree from Université Paris II Panthéon-Assas. This eclectic background shows in her drawings, with their multilayered surfaces, foreground and background the subject of contention. With titles like “Active Management,” “Dark Pool Liquidity,” “Splash Crash” (pictured) and “Model Risk,” they take the terminology of the boardroom and the stock-market trading floor and transmute them. Geometric diagrams and big-game animals are seemingly affixed to the paper with ornamental ribbons, both prisoners and prizes of our aspirational economy. (Brian Staker)