Emily LaCour: At the Table
Artist Statement
I make work that is relational—about the shared space between us that is often reflective and binding. I began making table paintings during Covid. I pulled from memory, what I longed to see, and video recordings of gatherings. The table held the quiet gravity of shared space. Upon the loss of a matriarch and ultimate hostess, creator of a humble sense of occasion, and collector of people, I painted what it felt like to be at her table. The At the Table series explores the table as a site of convergence—where bodies gather, histories surface, and relationships unfold in real time. Sometimes I paint them from life as they are happening, and sometimes I create them from found photos, drawings, and videos in my studio. The paintings begin with familiar scenes of dining, ritual, and shared space, yet they resist fixed narratives as the surface is worked and expands into a deep atmospheric space or a candle lit flickering. Across the series, figures emerge and dissolve into their surroundings, shaped through a process of pushing, pulling, and reworking the painted surface. This physical impermanence mirrors the emotional and relational dynamics embedded within each composition. Figures are often partially obscured or entangled with one another and their environments, creating spaces where boundaries blur. Influenced by my lived experience—family structures, motherhood, friendship, grief, and connection—the work holds space for multiple temporalities at once: memory, inheritance, and the immediacy of the present moment. In my smaller paintings, I consider peripheral acts of care—what is going on in the other room or what happens when the table clears.
The table becomes both anchor and stage. It stabilizes every painting while all else around it remains fluid. It is a place of nourishment, ritual, equality, and ambiguity—something to push against. It asks, what is offered, what is taken, and what lingers? The politics of our most intimate relationships happen here and are what build our world. The composition invites you to find resonance and to consider the shared experiences that bind us.
Artist Reception: Emily LaCour
Thursday, November 5 | 6 pm
Curator Comments
Emily LaCour an artist tenaciously dedicated to painting. Through the fluidity of her painted relationships and dreamlike environments, she communicates the felt dynamics of relationships that transcend particular spaces. Influenced by her own relationships as part of a family unit and a new mother, she transcribes her personal and observed experiences into paralleling narratives. The image transforms as she works. Figures are often painted in and out, and the narrative shifts like a lucid dream. Her dissolution and search of boundaries between figures and the figure to their environment comes by a physical process of pushing, pulling, drawing, and carving into oil. As recently described, “She turns bodies toward one another, and makes complex environments around them, a pioneering achievement that we should learn from.” – Mary Vernon
In each painting the participants are bound by bold brushwork and the emotional dynamics of color as people gather around a table. You can almost guess what they are talking about in the warm glow of companionship. The relationship of the figures to one another as they share a meal and conversation the emotional center of each painting.
LaCour’s first art teacher was her grandmother, a Louisiana landscape painter. She later studied painting at the New York Studio School and holds an MFA from Southern Methodist University and a BFA from Louisiana State University, where she later taught. In 2023 she had her first museum acquisition by the Grace Museum though the 2023 Collectors Circle event and her first solo museum exhibition in 2026.
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