'Nature’s Prophet' by Emma Pryde at King’s Leap, New York

King’s Leap is proud to present 'Nature’s Prophet', a presentation of works by Emma Pryde.  In her first solo show, Emma Pryde presents the traces of an artificial world. The behind-the-scenes ephemera of a highly sexualized video-shoot, a series of ceramics that bear remarkable resemblance to creatures from the Pokémon universe, and a reproduction of Boticelli’s The Vision of St. Augustine from the Altarpiece of St. Barnabas, all come together to demonstrate a working shorthand toward the simulation of many types of fantasy.

For Pryde, simulation is an experiment that warps our understanding of why these properties are fetishized or idealized to begin with. Unlike the perfect composite of reality presented in Fassbinder’s World on a Wire, Pryde’s dense environments of video, sculptures, and painting are feverish reproductions of the tensions inherent to the original fantasy. They are copies but obviously something is off.

The ideals and expectations projected on to the domain of our fantasies aren’t perfectly translated to our own world because they already exists here in broken or problematized states. Pornography, Pokémon, and the visions of Christian theologians all have their own internal narratives that become twisted and unmoored from their native state as they are transmuted into an image or object. This perversion is not one of something having been lost, but of something having been added–they have been made heavier by the bulbous protuberances of culture attaching itself to mythology.