Fredericks & Freiser and Margot Samel are pleased to present Mourning Sun, a solo exhibition by Dustin Emory (b.1999, Atlanta, Georgia), spanning both gallery spaces in New York. This marks Emory’s first solo exhibition with each gallery, and his debut in New York.

Patterns are hard to break. Particularly when they are inherited by our dominant social moment that progresses within and through its own repetitions. Drop a rock in a charted path of ants and two paths form around the obstacle, marching on with expedited efficiency. But fail to provide adequate infrastructure to a lower income neighborhood and those living within it will have far fewer opportunities for economic self- betterment, repeating inherited patterns of social despair. The phonetic doubling of Dustin Emory’s Mourning Sun–heard both as Morning Sun, and Mourning Son– proposes a dialectical entrapment that reflects on experiencing contemporary life within these cycles of reproduction.

Films play in the background of Emory’s Atlanta studio; the artist often finds himself painting to dialogue. This ambient cinematic intensity permeates his composition-building, rendering each piece in strict greyscale with figures solidified in Pumice stone. Emory first cites prison break movies. He is interested in the idea that if a key were simply found, these films wouldn’t be exciting, or exist at all. A key must be invented, come from both inside and out. In Surveillance, a figure stretches towards a television, a bedsheet falls from his mattress to reveal bare legs covered only by a set of boxers. A whiskey glass has been overturned to the left of stage. On the monitor the same scene is cast at a birds-eye view. It is an infinity mirror, of sorts. One wonders if turning the television off might break this chain. However, as the exhibition moves from first– to third–person, this omniscient lens suggests that a viewer is already compromised within the patterns of what only appears to be an objective point of view. Emory’s own father is experiencing incarceration, and his brother struggles through addiction. The rules need to be changed for freedom to come.

It was between the end of The Great Depression and emergence of The Cold War that the genre of Noir in American film also sought to animate these complex subjects, taking hold of a nation in the throws of rapid flux. A class-conscious genre, it tended to track a morally ambiguous main character through greater American society, moving from its cities to its suburbs, through a gritty and subductive struggle with cynicism, wary of new emerging wealth and a rise of puritanical self justifications, asking, “how will Americans continue to live?” The works presented in Emory’s exhibition pick up this question, echoing and updating Noir’s aesthetics.